De Vereniging van Enthousiasten voor het Reële en het Universele (The Association of Enthusiasts for the Real and the Universal) is a theatre collective consisting of Dirk Van Dijck, Ryszard Turbiasz and Johan Dehollander. The three met as actors in Needcompany’s production Need to know (1987).

The first production by the De Vereniging van Enthousiasten was Marche funèbre pour chat, which premiered during the Bruzzle theatre festival in Brussels in 1989. In the four years that followed, the collective created another six productions, including De mensenslinger (a monologue by Van Dijck with texts by Henri Michaux), We liegen, Karamazow goes crazy and Faust? Moet kunnen! These were not existing plays, but text collages in which the absurd primarily signifies a great sensitivity to reality and a fascination for the strangeness of everyday life, rather than an interest in madness. The Vereniging allows the audience to look at reality through a magnifying glass and shows that what is considered normal and how people engage with one another is, on further inspection, often bizarre, cruel and inhuman.

In no time at all, this collective became a high-profile company, but it disbanded at the height of its powers in 1994. The three then went their separate ways.

Surrounded by several other actors, Rusland voor beginners (2002, KVS/Dastheater) saw the three back on stage together for the first time, after which they began working together again in various combinations. In 2005, Dehollander and Van Dijck (with Bernard Van Eeghem) worked on Darger/Slash (Dastheater) and later decided to create at least one production under the auspices of Dastheater, starting with a reprise of the performance March funèbre pour chat, with which it all began 16 years before. The collective believe this new beginning to be a perfect introduction for a new audience and an excellent opportunity to test the shelf-life of the work.

In 2006, De Vereniging once again began collaborating with the KVS in Brussels, by analogy with Rusland voor beginners in 2002. This civic theatre produced Als, Dan, which was highly successful, and invited the collective to engage in further joint ventures. However, due to the failure of operating subsidies to appear, this ultimately did not materialise. Ever since, the collective has been working on a project basis. In 2008, it created L’Origine du Monde for Dummies and 2009 saw the premiere of ça brûle, a coproduction with the Roovers. In 2010, De Vereniging will be staging Van Plato tot Nato, coproduced by the KVS.