advancing european dance

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Keeping on track: a European culture trip by train

Can we opt for rail tracks instead of flight trails? Springback editor Sanjoy Roy gave it a go – and shares some practical and life lessons from the experience

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Read Icon Encantado by Lia Rodrigues. A ragged line of dancers swathed with exuberant multicoloured cloths and fabrics swirling all around them

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Lia Rodrigues, body and soul

Based in a Rio favela and fêted in Paris, Lia Rodrigues brings different yet connected works to this year’s Festival d’Automne

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Read Icon Mia Habib’s How to Die, Inopiné. Woman with cropped hair and outstretched arms is looking up in the foreground. She wears a grey unitard embroidered with lichen-like greys and oranges. In the background are four others, in similar costumes. Wooden pallets lie on the floor and there is smoke in the background.

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CODA collection: four dances from Norway

A collection of four responses to four works at CODA Oslo International Dance Festival 2021

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Read Icon Mette Ingvartsen in The Dancing Public. Woman in trunks and sleeveless top, head thrown back and arms up, on a platform. Behind and to the right of her is her own shadow on the wall

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Mette Ingvartsen: The Dancing Public

Can a theatre event infect a public body with movement?

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Read Icon Read Icon The final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up

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Dance+: Blow-Up

Blowing up the final scene of Antonioni’s notorious film to reveal the games of reality and representation

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Read Icon Silvia Gribaudi’s Monjour. Photo © Andrea Macchia, courtesy Torinodanza Festival / Teatro Stabile di Torino - Teatro Nazionale

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Silvia Gribaudi: Monjour

A troupe of men with hands for fig-leaves are ‘just for you’ in a performance that is both bittersweet and perplexing

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Read Icon Lukas Blaha in Lavabo. Photo © Vojtěch Brtnický

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Czech Dance Platform 2021

Lena Megyeri at the bumper edition of the Tanec Praha’s Czech Dance Platform

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Read Icon Read Icon woman in red top, blue sleeves and ochre shorts, in a shoulder stand with legs in the air. The right leg has a prosthesis below the knee. Behind her are draped fabric curtains of different cuts and colours, and a tower made of foam offcuts

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Dance+: Material Bodies

Accessories, prosthetics, props, extensions, constructions… Dorothy Allen-Pickard’s short film on the blur between materials and bodies

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Read Icon Two barechested men on the floor. One (Dan Daw) on his back with one leg bent the other extended, the other (Christopher Owen) reaches towards Daw with this outstretched arm

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The Dan Daw Show

A Crip kink dance shows the linkage of liberation and constraint, the leashed and the unleashed – physically, erotically, socially, emotionally

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Read Icon FIEBRE, by Tamara Alegre, Lydia Östberg Diakité, Nunu Flashdem, Marie Ursin, Célia Lutangu. Winner of the [8:tension] Young Choreographers’ Series. Photo © Nelly Rodriguez

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A week at ImPulsTanz Vienna

To complement our snappy 1-line reviews of 26 ImPulsTanz shows, let Lena Megyeri be your in-depth guide to one week at the month-long festival

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Read Icon Outdoor audience on socially distanced seats looking at the lit MultiStory stage, Edinburgh Castle in the background

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Edinburgh Festivals Diary, August 2021

Big arts festivals have been cautiously opening up to the public – but what is it like to be there? Róisín O’Brien sampled summer dance in Edinburgh…

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Read Icon Read Icon Mads Mikkelsen as Martin, drinking from a bottle surrounded by partying students in the final scene of Thomas Vinterberg’s film Another Round

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Dance+: Another Round

In the marvellous finale of Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, a dance, not a drink, comes to fill a lack in our lives. Here are two takes on the scene, one on the merging of actor, character and movement, the other a close-up of the dance itself.

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Read Icon Dark red and black photo of the dance project by PRICE called Melodies are so far my best friend – showing a cloaked man standing on a raised table, surrounded by audience members in Covid facemasks

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ImPulsTanz Vienna: one-sentence reviews

Twenty-six performances from ImPulsTanz Vienna 2021 – condensed into one sentence each

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Read Icon Dancers in bright green, orange, red and purple outfits, in front of a brass band in city square in Woolwich Southeast London. Part of Protein Dance’s guided performance En Route.

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Protein Dance: En Route

An antidote to digital dislocation, guided experiences such as Protein's En Route reconnect us with place and presence

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Read Icon Woman in black with long arc of hair as she leans her body to the left, against a brick wall backdrop

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Isabelle Schad: Pieces and Elements / FUR

Slow, steady, serene – an open-air double bill by German choreographer Isabelle Schad

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Read Icon Cristina Kristal Rizzo, Ultras. Photo © Renzo Zuppiroli

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Going forward to normal

Italian choreographer Michele Di Stefano on curation, choreography and the possibility of a ‘new normal’ for dance

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Read Icon Isadorino Gore. Disability Knights. Photo by Victor Zhukov, 2015

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Strange Russian dances

What is happening in experimental choreography in Moscow and Saint Petersburg?

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Read Icon A man and a dancer lie spreadeagled on the floor in the same position, in Katja Heitmann’s Motus Mori

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SPRING Festival Utrecht: ‘Seen live, with love, Jordi’

A letter to and two postcards from ‘test events’ for the reawakening of live performance

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Read Icon [image description: Katharina and Tanja are wearing the same stripy jumpsuit in colours of blues, green, reds and salmon with bare-skinned arms, shoulders and backs. Tanja is sitting on the floor with her back facing us. She has a round tattoo in the centre of her upper back. Tanja is slightly leaning to the left, which lets parts of her upper body escape the picture frame. Her head is turned to the right and her gaze is following a black crutch, which she is supporting with her stretched-out right hand. The tip of the crutch catches Katharina’s jumpsuit, furling it and revealing more of her white skin. Katharina’s two legs and her backside are visible and in a motion of moving towards the right, therefore the rest of her body is escaping the frame. It might even seem as if the crutch is luring Katharina back into the picture? End of description.]

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Skype, crutches and pleasurable glitches

Collaborators Tanja Erhart and Katharina Senk talk about multi-sensorial connection, technological pleasures and the aesthetics of access

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Read Icon IG cover image of @somatic_based_content_only: crude eyes and mouth drawn on top of rainbow coloured images of dancers bodies in leotards

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The memeing of dance

Dance memes may be common, but few emerge from within the contemporary dance world. Enter Mr Felden Krisis…

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Read Icon Spaced dancers in grey against a grey background in Jan Martens: any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones. Photo © Phile Deprez

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Jan Martens: any attempt will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones

A stripped down but hyperkinetic composition invokes a collective will

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Read Icon Marion Darova and Martina Apostolova, two women in white sneakers and dark blueish trousers and tops, on a dark bluish stage, with two floor lights behind them, in their stage duet WO MAN

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Marion Darova & Martina Apostolova: WO MAN

Strict forms and unsettling imagery combine to dissolve gender identity

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Read Icon Read Icon Jitterbugging couples and dark shadows against a purple background, the opening scene of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive

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Dance+: Mulholland Drive

Dance can slip through the nets of convention and identity – just like the films of David Lynch

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Read Icon Woman smiles at her teacher on a laptop screen before an online fitness class

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Dance classes through the screen

Springback experiences of what works (or doesn’t) as online class participants

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Read Icon Two dancers on either side of a video screen place their hands to their ears, as does a third woman on the video screen. A moment in Ann Van den Broek's video performance Creating Joy, for her company WArd/waRD

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Ann Van den Broek: Creating Joy

A polished kinetic, aural and videographic walk around joy, guided by Flemish choreographer Ann Van den Broek

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Read Icon Simon Senn with laptop, microphone and audiovisual equipment at desk. Face of woman, digitally superimposed, on large screen behind him, in the performance Be Arielle F

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Present futures

Going digital in 2020 has been a natural step for a festival founded to hybridise physical and virtual realms

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Read Icon Read Icon Doubled: Lupita Nyong’o as Red and Adelaide in Jordan Peels’s Us (2019)

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Dance+: Us

Double trouble in the climactic dance scene of Jordan Peele’s 2019 horror Us

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Guest episode: dis[]tanz podcast

Observing and considering how a performance-protest in Athens came to inhabit both the real and the online worlds

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Read Icon Man (Hamid Ben Mahi) holding a clay lantern with smoke arising from it

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Hamid Ben Mahi: Chronic(s) 2

Revisiting a work twenty years on, hip hop dance artist Hamid Ben Mahi finds that the fundamental things still apply, as time goes by

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Read Icon A photograph of a person surrounded by loose pages that they have torn from a book with their mouth. They are leaning against a wall, seated on the floor. Their face is entirely obscured by a mouthful of pages. They have shoulder-length brown hair and wear an apron covered in mud.

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Beyond the visual: Johanna Hedva’s Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain

As live arts migrate to the screen, Claire Lefèvre wonders whether a book might more fully register and reawaken the aura of live performance

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Read Icon Read Icon dance scene in Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation

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Dance+: Permanent Vacation

Dance brings a moment of presence within the waking dream of a world adrift

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Read Icon Compagnie Yoann Bourgeois: Celui qui tombe (He Who Falls). Photo © Foteini Christofilopoulu

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Circulating artists, defunded infrastructures (audio)

Don’t just blame Covid for this crisis: restructuring the cultural field had already led to more artists and fewer resources

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Read Icon Compagnie Yoann Bourgeois: Celui qui tombe (He Who Falls). Photo © Foteini Christofilopoulu

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Circulating artists, defunded infrastructures

Don’t just blame Covid for this crisis: restructuring the cultural field had already led to more artists and fewer resources

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Read Icon Hands do not touch your precious Me. Photo © Danny Willems

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Ultima Vez: Hands do not touch your precious Me

An online premiere from Wim Vandekeybus, Olivier de Sagazan and Charo Calvo that ventures into mythic worlds

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Read Icon recording video on iPad

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Screening times

As Covid has brought screened dance and screendance into close proximity, four screendance curators look at the dynamics between them

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Read Icon Image from International Screendance Festival Freiburg, Germany. Photo © Franck Boulègue

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Screening times (audio)

As Covid has brought screened dance and screendance into close proximity, four screendance curators look at the dynamics between them

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Read Icon Wanjiru Kamuyu, An Immigrant's Story. Photo © Pierre Planchenault

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Wanjiru Kamuyu, An Immigrant’s Story; Smaïl Kanouté, Never Twenty One

Edgy performances at the edge of Paris that take us beyond our own horizons

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Read Icon Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Michael Turinsky and Teresa Vittucci in We Bodies. Photo © Mayra Wallraff

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Teresa Vittucci, Michael Turinsky, Claire Vivianne Sobottke: We Bodies

We Bodies is an hour-long performative question on monsterhood, exorcism, domination, docility – and more

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Read Icon black and white figure of running man with text overlay

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Life sentences: on reviewing and renewing (audio)

Can performance reviews escape from the sentences of the courtroom or the classroom, and live a little more?

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Read Icon Read Icon black and white figure of running man with text overlay

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Life sentences: on reviewing and renewing

Can performance reviews escape from the sentences of the courtroom or the classroom, and live a little more?

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Visible and erased: the case of the ‘Alzheimer’s ballerina’

What does the viral video of a former dancer with Alzheimer’s disease suggest about the dancer, about disease, about us?

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Read Icon Read Icon A moment from the rooftop dance scene in the final episode of Giri/Haji

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Dance+: Giri/Haji

The BBC/Netflix crime drama Giri/Haji is another sign of mainstream media turning to contemporary dance for inspiration and innovation

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Read Icon Light and body in Adrien M & Claire B’s Faire Corps

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Adrien M & Claire B: Faire corps

A rapturous fusion of sensation and motion, imagination and engineering, and body with light

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Read Icon Woman and wheeled packing container in Marcos Morau’s Sonoma, La Veronal

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Marcos Morau: Sonoma, Surrealism and me

Threads of history – artistic, cultural, personal – lie beyond the exuberant images and costumes of Marcos Morau’s new work Sonoma

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Read Icon Young woman book covering face

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The leap into the abyss and the need to heal again

Anastasio Koukoutas spoke to some recent dance graduates to find out how they feel about their future, in the face of the coronavirus crisis

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Read Icon Dazzle: Solo, a VR experience by Bruno Martelli and Ruth Gibson. Photo courtesy of BFI London Film Festival

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Dancing virtually into the London Film Festival

Alongside dance documentaries, the new LFF Expanded strand is taking steps into virtual dancing

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Read Icon Joachim Koester, Tarantism, 2007. © Courtesy of Joachim Koester and Jan Mot, Brussels

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Danser Brut – outsider dance

A wide ranging exhibition across two museums in Belgium affords fascinating visions of the idea of ‘outsider dance’

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Read Icon Read Icon Animal courtship dances transformed into human choreography: the ‘Act of Love’ 2016 video for Sagami condoms

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Dance+: Act of Love

Animal courtship dances transformed into human choreography by Russell Maliphant, to advertise condoms

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Read Icon ‘is it my world?’ in Rome 2020, by italian performance group kinkaleri

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kinkaleri: is it my world?

How a public relay by Italian group kinkaleri turns into a fruitful question: have we become estranged from the world we created?

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Read Icon “Do not feed the polar bears” by Domokos Kovács and Petra Nagy. Photo © Anett Kállai-Tóth

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Domokos Kovács & Petra Nagy: Do not feed the polar bears

Two Hungarian creators on their response to environmental questions in conception, production and performance of their latest work

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Read Icon Read Icon Beach dance in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom

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Dance+: Moonrise Kingdom

In Wes Anderson’s 2012 film, two runaway pre-teens dance on the empty beach of an unknown land called love

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Read Icon Movement director Ayse Tashkiran rehearsing Maria Aberg’s 2018 production of The Duchess of Malfi, Royal Shakespeare Company. Photo © Helen Maybanks/RSC

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To sit or not to sit? The question of movement direction

What do movement directors do? A new collection of interviews shines a light on an overlooked craft

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Read Icon Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in 3ird5 @ w9rk. Photo © Anne Van Aerschot

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Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Radouan Mriziga: 3ird5@w9rk

The intersection of nature with culture – a garden – forms the setting for a site-specific duet by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Radouan Mriziga

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Read Icon Faye Driscoll. Photo © Maria Baranova

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Faye Driscoll: Guided Choreography for the Living and the Dead

Choreography through headphones, motionless performance within our heads, self-isolation and fantasy – Faye Driscoll’s ’audio choreography’ gets inside you

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Read Icon Cherish Menzo: Jezebel. Photo © Bas de Brouwer

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Talkabout: Urban dance languages at Peepshow Palace

A dialogue on content, context and tradition in urban dance at a corona-proof performance season in Amsterdam

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Read Icon Body prints from Yasmeen Godder’s I’m Here. Photo © Omer Alsheich

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Forward steps

Rather than longing for the past, some dance artists are using the pandemic crisis to imagine futures for performance

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Read Icon Woman dancer in public street, from Une joie secrète (2019), a film by Jérôme Cassou on the Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s project ‘Une minute de danse par jour’,

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Local leads the way: Pelzverkehr Festival, Austria

The Covid crisis is shifting focus from the international to the regional – but festivals such as Pelzverkehr have already been there for years

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Read Icon Dissemination Everywhere! – a ‘radio ballet’ by Hamburg-based collective LIGNA. Photo © Christian Altorfer

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Unknown waters: Berlin’s Tanz im August after Covid

Tanz im August director Virve Sutinen on rethinking the festival for post-pandemic times

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Read Icon Dancer in 'The Crater', a performance practice in Athens, 2020

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Being together apart: the hollowing of the post-quarantine public

A public performance ‘practice’ in Athens responded to the coronavirus crisis – but did ‘The Crater’ rethink or recreate its underlying conditions?

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Dance+: Protein synthesis – an epic on the cellular level

A mind-blowing, free-spirited dance film that is both scientifically exact and culturally far out

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Read Icon Peeping Tom, Diptych. Photo © Virginia Rota

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Peeping Tom: The Missing Door, The Lost Room

Works in mysterious ways: two pieces by Belgian physical theatre company Peeping Tom

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Read Icon Razzle-dazzle and death: Pere Faure's Rèquiem Nocturn. Photo © Alfred Mauve

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Pere Faura: Rèquiem Nocturn

Pere Faura’s extravagant tribute to Bob Fosse mixes mortality with showbiz and mundane life

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Read Icon Gloria Biachi and Serge Arthur Dodoc in Bausch’s Rite of Spring, captured on a beach in Senegal

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Sands of time: capturing Bausch’s Rite of Spring before lockdown

A rehearsal for a performance that never was: École des Sables’ version of Bausch’s Rite of Spring catches a moment in time

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www DANCE: partying from IRL to URL

The mix of Covid, digital connectivity and our deep-felt human drive to dance together have reconfigured our dancing spaces

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Read Icon Read Icon Joaquin Phoenix looks in mirror in the bathroom dance scene of Todd Phillips’ 2019 film Joker

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Dance+: Joker

A solitary dance becomes a rite of transformation in Todd Phillips’ 2019 Joker

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Read Icon young woman doing exercise with laptop

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The rise of the online dance class in lockdown

The offer, the reach and the uses of online dance classes are expanding during lockdown – and beyond?

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Strange times

The coronavirus lockdown induces strange visions of our absence. Dance is an art of presence. Can we reconcile their values for the sake of the future?

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A virus in the system

Covid-19 is prising reality from normality. What thoughts and feelings arise from this fissure for our Springback network?

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Read Icon Iro Vasalou, Becoming with Animal. Photo © Andreas Simopoulos

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New Choreographers Festival Athens

A Springback spinoff at the seventh New Choreographers Festival

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Read Icon Read Icon Shot of opening dance scene of Gaspar Noé's Climax

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Gaspar Noé: Climax

Gaspar Noé’s Climax is thrilling, stylish and harrowing. Its story is prefigured in the extraordinary opening dance scene

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Read Icon Doug Letheren in Revisor. Photo © Michael Slobodian

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Crystal Pite/Jonathon Young: Revisor

A farce in the fog of post-truth, post-dramatic abstractions… Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young’s Revisor trails a string of questions

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Read Icon Daniel Linehan’s sspeciess. Photo © Danny Willems

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Daniel Linehan: sspeciess

Exploring co-existence and ‘becoming-with’, Daniel Linehan’s new group piece radiates radical softness

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Read Icon KDV Dance Ensemble in Las Casas Invisibles at Funkhaus, Berlin. Photo © Jubal Battisti

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KDV Dance Ensemble: Las Casas Invisibles

A new company are the first contemporary dance show to headline at Berlin’s iconic electronic music venue Funkhaus

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Read Icon Dimitris Papaioannou’s Sisyphus/Trans/Form. Photo © Julian Mommert

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A stage in the gallery: Dimitris Papaioannou’s Sisyphus/Trans/Form

Dimitris Papaioannou’s first site-specific work for an art gallery, at Collezione Maramotti

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Read Icon Anna Biczók’s performance lecture Precedents to a potential future. Photo © Katarzina Chmura

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On and off the platform: dunaPart5, Hungary

New voices at the Hungarian platform for performing arts – and new battles over state support and control

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Read Icon Stine Nilsen, the new director at CODA Oslo International Dance Festival

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From company dancer to co-director to CODA: an interview with Stine Nilsen

Former co-director of Candoco (UK), Stine Nilsen returns to Norway as director of CODA Oslo International Dance Festival

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Read Icon Mårten Spångberg in 46. Photo: Yasen Vasilev

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Mårten Spångberg: 46

The advocate of ‘post-dance’ performs a solo – hashtagged #lonelyformalism – that reassembles his own choreographies

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Read Icon Cie BurnOut in Jann Gallois’ Samsara

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Jann Gallois: Samsara

All rise: choreographer, curtains, dancers and spirit ascend in a piece about worldly bondage and higher powers

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Read Icon Lucy Suggate’s Spirit Compass, at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK. Photo © Tui Makkonen

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The Continuous Network: capillary action of dance into galleries

A four-year UK collaboration between Siobhan Davies Dance and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art asks: why take dance into art galleries, and what can happen when you do?

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Read Icon Read Icon Online, offline and in line: Chinese schoolchildren learn the shuffle

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Dance+: Dancing in the schoolyard

T-step on the tarmac? An innovative school principal goes viral with his plan to get kids moving

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Read Icon Daniela Cruz in Cristina Planas Leitão’s UM [unimal]. Photo © Susana Neves

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PT19: On being, enduring and becoming the performing body

Controlling, uncovering and being the performer’s body, at the 2019 Portuguese Platform for Performing Arts

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Read Icon Photo from Coexist by Hodworks and Unusual Symptoms

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Hodworks & Unusual Symptoms: Coexist

Fearless performers brace themselves in a questing, questioning work by Hodworks (HU) and Theater Bremen (DE)

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Read Icon Mirjam Sögner at Montag Modus Berlin

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Moving audiences: the Montag Modus event series

Berlin curator Léna Szirmay-Kalos on developing new formats for showcasing performance outside the theatre

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Read Icon Woman on floor with microphone at POST-DANCE-ING 2019 conference, Stockholm

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Postdancing in the dark

Posting from the POST-DANCE-ING conference in Stockholm 2019, Anna Kozonina asks: how did it work, what did it do?

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Read Icon Scottish Dance Theatre in Ritualia, by Colette Sadler. Photo © Brian Hartley

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Fringe cuts from Edinburgh 2019

A week of dance at the Edinburgh Fringe, as seen by Lena Megyeri at the 2019 NICritics programme for independent writers

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Read Icon Read Icon Brother Sam (Kwok-kwan Chan) and the Axe Gang take the floor in Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle (2004)

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Dance+: Kung Fu Hustle

Slick, stylish, violent… the Axe Gang in Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle know how to cut a figure on the dance floor – and off it…

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Read Icon Tanz, by Florentina Holzinger

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Florentina Holzinger: TANZ, a sylphic reverie in stunts

Pitching witch against fairy, Florentina Holzinger’s TANZ bares the corporal discipline and punishment of romantic ballet through brutal parody and spectacular stunts

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Read Icon Dançando com a Diferença in La Ribot’s Happy Island. Photo © Caroline Morel Fontaine

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La Ribot / Dançando com a Diferença: Happy Island

You can see the trees on Happy Island. What about the wood?

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Read Icon Chris Haring’s Liquid Loft company in Stand-Alones (polyphony)

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New directions home? ImPulsTanz 2019

Lena Megyeri reflects on the crisis of objective in contemporary dance at Vienna's contemporary dance festival.

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Read Icon Luke Pell’s library event In the Ink Dark.

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Radical empathy and real engagement: Take Me Somewhere 2019

Dance artists at Glasgow’s genre-crossing festival of experimental performance take you beyond performance itself

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Read Icon Naturalistic movement and spoken word: Gunilla Heilborn’s The Ordinary and The Wonderful.

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Gunilla Heilborn: The Wonderful and The Ordinary

A work in which the ordinary surpasses the wonderful leads to wonderings about words

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Read Icon Local performers from Berlin in Oona Doherty’s Hard to be Soft

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Oona Doherty: Hard to be Soft – A Belfast Prayer

An attempt to heal the trauma of the collective Belfast body produces very mixed results

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Read Icon Local kids take the audience in hand in Francesca Grilli’s Sparks

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Slow and gentle: Santarcangelo Festival 2019

Performances at the 49th Santarcangelo Festival stir our sense of being and embodiment

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Read Icon Read Icon a kitchen tango lesson in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together

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Dance+: Happy Together

A tango scene in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together invites our hearts into the spaces between separation and togetherness, fiction and reality

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Read Icon Dismantling virginity: Teresa Vittucci in Hate Me, Tender.

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Six of their sex: female dancemakers at ImPulsTanz 2019

A choreographic variety of women’s work at ImPulsTanz Vienna

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Read Icon Janet Novás and Mercedes Peón in Mercedes máis eu.

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Earth moves: contemporary roots at Sismògraf festival

The old made anew: three contemporary choreographers reworking folkloric heritage at Sismògraf Festival

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Read Icon Enrico Ticconi in Kat Válastur’s Rasp Your Soul

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Julidans NEXT, Amsterdam: performers steal the show

Julidans NEXT offers new opportunities for both artists and audiences

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Read Icon Ana Kreitmeyer / Sonja Pregrad (Croatia): Out There and In Here, at Antistatic Festival 2019, Sofia, Bulgaria

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Vote for dance: Antistatic Festival 2019, Bulgaria

The 12th Antistatic Festival called a #VoteForDance – but how did the performances poll with our reviewer?

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Read Icon More guided tour than stage performance: Mette Ingvartsen in 69 Positions.

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Hack me tender: Mette Ingvartsen’s Red Pieces

Orgies, utopias and joyful existence in Mette Ingvartsen’s Red Pieces

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Read Icon Read Icon Joe Alwyn and Rachel Weisz in Yorgos Lanthimos' The Favourite (2018)

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Dance+: The Favourite

In place and out of time: dance anachronisms in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite (2018) are part of a fickle world

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Read Icon Enrico Ticconi and Ginevra Panzetti, pointing fingers in dance film Actio (2102)

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Already there? An interview with Ginevra Panzetti & Enrico Ticconi

Italian choreographic duo Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi on powerplay and physical rhetoric – past and present

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Read Icon Rimini Protokoll’s Uncanny Valley at Spring Utrecht 2019

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SPRING Utrecht 2019: ‘In many ways, the future is already here’

Name it, hashtag it, experience it… The SPRING festival in Utrecht dives into dance, performance, installation, god, politics, gender – and the future

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Read Icon Read Icon The three children begin their dance performance in Yorgos Lanthimos's 2009 Dogtooth

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Dance+: Dogtooth

The distorting mirror of dance reflects an intimate reality of adolescent vulnerability in Dogtooth (2009)

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Read Icon Perfomers in Sofia Mavragani’s Afterwords, showing illuminated mouths

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Sofia Mavragani: Afterwords

Mouth movement makes for an intriguing choreographic experiment, but Anastasio Koukoutas doesn’t quite swallow it

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Read Icon Lenio Kaklea, holding mirror on stage in A Hand's Turn

article

Caught in the act of seeing

Look, then look again. Anastasio Koukoutas on altering visions in three contemporary dance pieces from Greece

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Read Icon Performance of Nicole Beutler’s Metamorphosis. Photo © Anja Beutler

review

Nicole Beutler Projects: 8: Metamorphoses

What’s the measure of a man? This performance questions what we are even measuring when we say ‘man’

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article

Dance+: Echoes, Ode to Silence

Andres Arochi’s short film uses dance to revisit Luis Barragán’s masterpiece of modernist architecture

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Read Icon At Rakete festival, Lau Lukkarila spells… Trouble.

article

Rakete Festival 2019: from Mama to Mother Earth

At the intersections between the personal and the panoramic – a new generation of dance artists at the Rakete Festival, Vienna

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Read Icon All Eyes On… by Teresa Vittucci. Photo © Nelly Rodriguez

article

Queer Darlings 2019, Sophiensaele Berlin

Camgirls and drag queens, chatrooms and cabaret: two surprising pieces from a festival of feminist and queer performance

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Read Icon Zoltán Vakulya (front) and Albert Quesada, OneTwoThreeOneTwo. Photo © Benjamin Sommabere

review

Albert Quesada & Zoltán Vakulya: OneTwoThreeOneTwo

An experiment in choreography and staging that is definitely ‘not flamenco’ – but neither is it something else

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Read Icon Hugo/Robyn Le Brigand in Sans Culotte, a ‘solo for two butt cheeks and one anus’. Photo © Franzi Kreis

article

Imagetanz 2019

Up close and personal with a lot of orifices at Vienna’s 30th Imagetanz Festival

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Read Icon Read Icon Dance scene from Norodom Sihanouk’s 1969 Cambodian film, La Joie de Vivre.

article

Dance+: La Joie de Vivre

Wedged between independence and genocide, a Cambodian dance scene shows that loving life is precious – and takes practice

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WATCH

At work: Jesús Rubio Gamo

‘It was dance and music that saved me from loneliness.’ Spanish choreographer Jesús Rubio Gamo talks about the turning point that led to the creation of Gran Bolero (2019)

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Read Icon Photo of Jefta van Dinther’s The Quiet

review

Jefta van Dinther: The Quiet

Quantum leaps in time… a mysterious world holds on to its secrets

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Read Icon Léa Tirabasso’s The Ephemeral Life of an Octopus.

review

Yukiko Masui / Léa Tirabasso

A double bill that contrasts mental anguish with physical recklessness

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Read Icon The Symptoms’ 2017 revival of You Trash! in Budapest

article

Trash aesthetic:
Meet The Symptoms

What is waste? Who is trash? Réka Szabó and Dániel Szász of The Symptoms speak about recycling a street performance

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Read Icon Read Icon Susie (Dakota Johnson) in the first dance scene from Luca Guadgnino’s Suspiria (2018)

article

Dance+: Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria

Toil and trouble brews in a cavernous, covenous dance company

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Read Icon Maya Jilan Dong in Whip (Akram Khan Company, Portraits in Otherness). Costume design by Marie Cantenys.

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At work: Marie Cantenys

‘The garment is not the outcome, the outcome is everything together.’ Fashion designer Marie Cantenys talks about working with dancer Maya Jilan Dong

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article

London International Mime Festival 2019

Using language and losing language: Theatre Re, Gecko and Peeping Tom at the 2019 London International Mime Festival

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Read Icon photo of Zoltán Vakulya and Chen-Wei Lee in Together Alone, Taiwan Dance Platform 2018

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Taiwan Dance Platform 2018

The 2018 Taiwan Dance Platform was ‘made in Asia’, but even more international in scope

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Read Icon Read Icon Keira Knightley and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina

article

Dance+: Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina

A pivotal scene in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina is wordless, its drama of love, transgression and death distilled in dance

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Read Icon Jan Martens’ Passing the Bechdel Test. Photo © Clara Hermans

review

Jan Martens: Passing the Bechdel Test

Jan Martens’ choreography is a canvas that interweaves the action and speech of teenage performers with an impressive array of feminist texts, figures and thoughts

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WATCH

At work: Bára Sigfúsdóttir

Icelandic choreographer Bára Sigfúsdóttir on working between reality and imagination

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Read Icon The young women in Rita Góbi’s Snapdragons. Photo: Gábor Dusa

translation

Pal Frenák: W_all / Rita Góbi: Snapdragons

translation

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Read Icon String Section by Reckless Sleepers, at DanceLive Aberdeen.

article

DanceLive Aberdeen, Scotland

Aberdeen’s DanceLive festival combines a productive dance platform and a conscious aim to connect with non-dance audiences

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article

Dance+: Mauvais Sang

An intoxicating scene from Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang embodies the headlong rush of youthful love and the mystery of its memory

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Read Icon A composite body in Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Babel. Photo © Maarten Van Den Abeele

article

Polyphony, playing and politics: the many voices of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

On voices, parts, and playing parts in the many-limbed choreography of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

Time Icon Pink   8 min
Read Icon Eisa Jocson’s Princess. Photo © Jörg Baumann

article

Oktoberdans, Bergen: minorities dance for a majority audience

Two programmes at Scandinavia's largest dance platform navigate the exclusivity of an ‘inclusive’ mindset

Time Icon Pink   9 min
Read Icon El Conde de Torrefiel in La Plaza. Photo © Els De Nil

article

Towards the ‘ironic spectator’

Apathy as activism: what has become of political art and a politicised audience?

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Read Icon Ivo Dimchev in Som Faves

review

Ivo Dimchev: Som Faves

A maniacal movement manifesto upends audience expectations in a one-off performance at London’s Chisenhale Dance Space

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Read Icon Read Icon Conformity scene from Dead Poets Society

article

Dance+: Dead Poets Society

Show, don’t tell! A teacher’s lesson on conformity from an embodied perspective

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Read Icon One body inhabited by many: Calixto Neto’s oh!rage

article

Black and blue at Festival Les Plateaux

Choreographers Ana Pi and Calixto Neto take on ‘black dance’ on their own terms

Time Icon Pink   6 min
Read Icon Igor Urzelai and Moreno Solinas, Idiot-Syncrasy

article

Favourite jumper: Igor & Moreno, Idiot-Syncrasy

Caring but not careful – who knew an hour of jumping up and down would touch so many people in so many ways?

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Read Icon Read Icon Childish Gambino, ‘This is America’

article

Down in one: the single-shot music video

On the appeal and the achievement of the one-shot music video

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Read Icon Read Icon screenshot of Christian Bale In American Pscyho Hip to be Square scene

article

Dance+: American Psycho

Is that a raincoat or are you just glad to see me? Róisín O’Brien on the choreography of a murder

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Read Icon Photo of Nora Chipaumire: Portrait of Myself as My Father

article

Tanz im August talkabout #2: portrait of myself as my father (Nora Chipaumire), The Waves (Noé Soulier)

Springback’s Berlin Three discuss patterns and parentage in two very different pieces at the Tanz im August season

Time Icon Pink   9 min
Read Icon ‘Double You’, a project idea from the London Dansathon event

article

Dansathon: an international dance hackathon

A report from the first ‘international dance hackathon’, a joint venture between Liège, London and Lyon that is more than just a competition

Time Icon Pink   10 min
Read Icon Grupo de Rua in Bruno Beltrão’s Inoah

article

Tanz im August talkabout #1: Inoah (Bruno Beltrão) and R. OSA (Silvia Gribaudi)

Springback’s Berlin Three discuss body politics and national politics at the Tanz im August season

Time Icon Pink   9 min
Read Icon Jefta van Dinther Dark Field Analysis. Photo © Ben Mergelsberg

review

Jefta van Dinther: Dark Field Analysis

Two men embark on an expedition inside the body and beyond the mind, in Jefta van Dinther’s psychedelic Dark Field Analysis

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article

Les Brigittines International Festival 2018

A many-layered thing: contrasting takeaways of our Springback writers at Les Brigittines, Brussels, reflect the genre-crossing styles of the festival itself

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Read Icon Michikazu Matsune, Elizabeth Ward and Frans Poelstra in Matsune’s All Together.

review

Michikazu Matsune: All Together

Recollection, reflection and re-enactment make for a memorable evening in Michikazu Matsune’s new piece about people both present and absent

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Read Icon Read Icon Abigail Breslin in the dance scene from the 2006 movie Little Miss Sunshine

article

Dance+: Little Miss Sunshine

For the win! Anna Kaszuba on why artlessness triumphs in the dance scene from ‘Little Miss Sunshine’

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Read Icon Rosas The Six Brandenburg Concertos by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

review

Rosas: The Six Brandenburg Concertos

A workbook choreographic exercise builds to a surprisingly exhilarating finale in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s new Six Brandenburg Concertos

Time Icon Pink   2 min
Read Icon composite of YouTube thumbnails for Nuria Guiu Sagarra’s Likes and Premier Stratagème’s Forecasting

article

Shape of YouTube

Two widely viewed danceworks beg the questions: how does YouTube shape dance? And how do you shape YouTube?

Time Icon Pink   6 min
Read Icon Rollerblading performers of Alex Baczynski-Jenkins's Us Swerve

article

[8:tension] at ImPulsTanz Vienna 2018

Don’t expect the new to be comfortable: the [8:tension] platform for new choreography is provocative, plural, sometimes tedious – and often out of the comfort zone

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Read Icon Jo Bannon in We Are F*cked

review

Jo Bannon: We Are F*cked

Doubt and disturbance come to a climax in Jo Bannon’s powerfully penetrating performance

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Read Icon Photo of Missing by physical theatre company Gecko

article

Beyond borders: Amit Lahav and Gecko

Gecko’s Amit Lahav talks to Daniel Pitt about straddling genres, insularity and internationalism in British theatre – and being pummelled with love

Time Icon Pink   7 min
Read Icon Read Icon Screencap of Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, Love Man scene

article

Dance+: Dirty Dancing

Alexandra Gray on her first time watching Dirty Dancing – and why Baby’s first time on the dancefloor stays with her

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Read Icon Photo of Taneli Törmä in Sophie Bellin-Hansen’s bell-covered costume, for the second section of the triptych COVER

review

Taneli Törmä: COVER – A symphonic poem in three movements

A merger of choreography and sound installation, Finnish artist Taneli Törmä’s COVER sensitively explores the kinaesthetic experience of sound.

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Read Icon Photo of Rocío Molina, Lola Cruz and Síliva Perez Cruz in Grito Pelao

review

Rocío Molina: Grito Pelao

They say that Mother knows best, but does she know how to turn that into a performance?

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Read Icon Crowd by Gisèle Vienne

review

Gisèle Vienne: Crowd

Is dance raving mad to look to the rave scene for inspiration?

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Read Icon Kwame Asafo-Adjei’s Family Honour

article

Danse Élargie 2018: big opportunities, bigger ambition

Beatboxing, b-boys, a beach and a balloon enlarge our concept of ‘dance’ in the fifth edition of the multi-disciplinary choreographic competition

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Read Icon Miet Warlop’s Fruits of Labor at Potsdamer Tanztage 2018

article

Potsdamer Tanztage
or: 3 × 3 = 8

When does 3 × 3 = 8? When our three reviewers go to three performances each at Berlin’s 2018 Potsdamer Tanztage festival

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Read Icon Woman held up by others in Veza Fernández dance theatre Wenn Auge Mund Wird

article

Bausch rebooted: Veza Fernández’s Wenn Auge Mund Wird

Vienna-based Veza Fernández refracts Bauschian Tanztheater through a contemporary prism

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article

Dance+: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Dancing home alone before going out to do what vampires do. Ka Bradley on a moment of dance in the movie A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

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Read Icon Giant pillow in An outdoor version of Pietro Marullo's Wreck

article

Pietro Marullo’s WRECK: survival of the fittest in the age of austerity?

Pietro Marullo’s ‘elastic performance’ is a staging of the struggle to survive in a precarious environment – and an example of it.

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Read Icon Oona Doherty in Hope Hunt (and the ascension into Lazarus).

review

Oona Doherty: Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus

A riveting portrait of the disadvantaged white male that meshes beauty with damnation

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Read Icon Silhouetted women in Florentina Holzinger's Apollon.

review

Florentina Holzinger: Apollon

Dance gets down and dirty – but is it worth the gross-out?

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Read Icon Solo dancer Katerina Andreou in BSTRD

review

Katerina Andreou: BSTRD

Can a solo dance piece create, on stage, that much needed room of one’s own?

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Read Icon 3 men in Timothy and the Things in László Fülöp’s choreography Hunting

review

Timothy and the Things: Hunting (Vadászat)

Three men hunting – but for what, for whom, and why? Anna Dohy looks to the wider stage for answers

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Read Icon Jasna Vinovrški’s solo Lady Justice

review

Jasna Vinovrški: Lady Justice

With witnesses, evidence and judgement – is a dance performance a bit of a trial?

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Read Icon Red picture of Ligia Lewis's Minor Matters

review

Ligia Lewis: Minor Matter

Black matters in Minor Matter, a powerful encounter with the myriad concepts of blackness

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Read Icon Luke Baio and Dominik Grünbühe in Aarhus, Denmark, 2017

WATCH

Dreams

‘We are dancers, we create the dreams.’ Albert Einstein

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Read Icon Audience and performers mix in Luke George's Public Action at Keir Choreographic Award

article

How to like dance

Audience clubs are on the increase - why? Luke Forbes on his experience of a new workshop in Melbourne

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Read Icon View of mountains and sea of Hammerfest, Norway

article

The wilderness within

What happens when dance takes nature as its stage? A festival in the northernmost town in the world leads to a changed sense of self, culture and existence

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Read Icon Christos Papadopoulos Opus

translation

Christos Papadopoulos’s Opus: in search of the dialectics of music and movement

A textual exploration of a performative exploration in sound, meaning and time

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Read Icon Nuria Guiu in Likes

LISTEN

Mònica Pagès watches Likes by Nùria Guiu

Classical music journalist Mònica Pagès sees a solo about the value of ‘likes’ in an age of social media. How was it for her?

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article

The naked stage of Sanna Kekäläinen

Riikka Laakso on Finnish choreographer Sanna Kekäläinen, and the subversions and inversions of her 2017 piece Whorescope

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Read Icon Photo of Mette Ingvartsen lying on stage in 21 Pornographies

review

Mette Ingvartsen: 21 pornographies

Assuming the position is at the heart of this physical exploration of erotica

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Read Icon Footballer and dancer in Vero Cendoya's La Partida

review

Vero Cendoya: La Partida

Beautiful as dance can be, is it really any match for the beautiful game?

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Read Icon Screenshot of video Meytal Blanaru At Work

WATCH

At work: Meytal Blanaru

Brussels-based Israeli choreographer Meytal Blanaru on the workings behind her work

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Read Icon Arkadi Zaides and TALOS, performance

review

Arkadi Zaides: TALOS

Arkadi Zaides' detatched demonstration of surveillance, digital simulation and border infringements

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Read Icon Hodworks: Sunday

review

Hodworks: Sunday

Hodworks’ Sunday begs the question: in the age of the selfie, what separates the person and the persona?

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Meet the Springback people

Enya Belak
Evgeny Borisenko
Ka Bradley
Clàudia Brufau
Rachel Burke
Cath Carver
Charles A. Catherine
Gaia Clotilde Chernetich
Oonagh Duckworth
Suzanne Frost
Beatrix Joyce
Kosta Karakashyan
Anna Kaszuba
Anastasio Koukoutas
Anna Kozonina
Riikka Laakso
Claire Lefèvre
Stella Mastorosteriou
Emily May
Lena Megyeri
Jelena Mihelčić
Alfredo Miralles
Róisín O’Brien
David Pallant
Betina Panagiotara
Greta Pieropan
Daniel Pitt
Léa Poiré
Marie Pons
Sanjoy Roy
Jonas Schildermans
Louise Tanoto
Jordi Ribot Thunnissen
Annette van Zwoll
Yasen Vasilev
Lydia Wharf
Lotte Wijers