Théâtre Marni

Théâtre Marni in Brussels is a 240-seat concert and performance room whose amphitheatre still carries traces of its cinema past: brick walls, wooden swing doors and a fixed rake. Its scale makes jazz sets, chamber music and singer-led shows feel focused, while the program reaches across contemporary theatre, dance, circus and visual art. For music fans, the practical draw is a seated, stage-forward room inside a venue that treats jazz as a core strand of its season.

A cinema’s second act

Marni began in 1948 as the Marni cinema on Place Eugène Flagey, built by architects M. Spinnael and S. Lebrun; its auditorium held as many as 1,825 people. The cinema closed in 1974, then served RTBF orchestral and choral rehearsals until 1982 before periods as film studios, bowling and snooker. In 1997, the Ensemble Théâtral Mobile converted the former cinema into Théâtre Marni, with the entrance shifted to Rue de Vergnies; Olivier Bastin, Olivier Messiaen, Vincent Szpirer and François Corin led the redesign. The opening production, Marc Liebens’s staging of Pierre Mertens’s Une paix royale, began on 2 October and ran through 1 November for 23 performances. By the following year, the company had been expelled, and the French Community of Belgium took the lease for a multipurpose cultural venue.

The room today

Concerts sit within an intentionally interdisciplinary policy: contemporary theatre, dance, circus, jazz and visual art share the calendar, with jazz a clear recurring focus. The main Salle occupies 300 square metres at ground level, with a fixed 240-seat tier facing a roughly 140-square-metre stage. That amphitheatre layout gives the room direct sightlines. Downstairs, a separate 300-square-metre bar space has its own stage and holds up to 260 standing; Marni runs the drinks service itself.