The trilogy Moeder & Kind,  Bernadetje and Alleemaal Indiaan, on which he collaborated with Alain Platel, made him an internationally acclaimed author, and a great number of his pieces have been published and staged in Portugal, France, Germany, England and USA .

The intriguing starting point of his work has to be found in the attraction of the soap opera and slang of the neighbourhood town Bruges Poort where he grew up. But after that there is a long process of transformation, digestion and unification. Social poverty presents a metaphor, almost an apology for his artistic process of reduction, dilution and cleaning so as to end with something important. This procedure is visible inside Sierens's dramaturgy and in his principles of directing. In the construction of characters or situations he owes a lot to Brecht's theory of gesture, but also to the effects of provoking dramatic irony in which the character is not aware of the truth of his situation, but the actor playing him is.

Sierens masterly uses language material and builds situations in astonishing breaks over unconvincing lives offered to him on an everyday basis. Sierens's work is recognizable by its originality of style and language, its friendly distance from traditional theatre, deeply based on both the lyricism of normality and its epics at once. His oeuvres are not fragments of life but injections to the mechanism of life's imperfections; it is a cruel and humorous theatre where poetics and hidden rituals constantly increase in significance.

In his shows he uses the technique of sampling, taking the role of an investigator of the present, constantly demystifying the alchemic base of theatre, counting with clear and remarkable gestures, the musical rhythm of movement, creating a permanent cross-over with popular culture.

He refers to authors and influences from all fields: mass media, comics, visual arts, pop music, photography. Influences can be traced to the theatre of the Far East, the Polish theatre author Tadeusz Kantor, Céline and especially in the film-makers Pasolini, Bresson, Scorsese, Wong Kar-Wai, Almodovar, Cassavetes, Kanevski and Bunuel, and he searches for modes for putting together the dance theatre of Pina Bausch and the narration of Dario Fo.

Some three years ago KVS, a theatre institution from Bruxelles started the Green Light project where they gathered an informal group of artists of black colour and African roots. On one of the workshops Raven Ruëll joined them and presented the French version of Sierens's show Martino. During the workshop they decided to start the collaboration with Ruëll and Sierens and try to find out how it would work with the francophone black actors.

In the piece Martino Sierens starts from a prescribed text, and through intense musical underscoring creates a surrounding spleen where the group, cruelty, heavy colours, movement and image are connected into a frenetic delirium.

We are in the bowels of the town. This famous establishment is bistro Martino which, now for already fifty years, serves the best sandwiches and steaks in the town of Gent .

In Martino, Sierens takes notes in a form of a diary during four vivid nights, noting personal tales and taking series of documents of troubled lives of men and women, of the martyrdom of their bourgeois status. This piece seems as if it was made by the traces of Dostoyevsky's White Nights: the bar owner, his children, Benito the cook, Willy the taxi driver, musician couple Nid and Sancy and two youngsters Gaetano and Evelyn. With them he travels through visions and stories: the father and his turbulent life, Niagara Falls , "short fuse" ex-lovers, drunken sailors.

Sierens regards his characters from some timid angle, fixates them, approaches them, pushes them to the edge of temptation, and then gives them the elegance to fall, so triviality trembles in an epic swing rarely seen since Brecht.

Link: Das Theater, KVS