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Mediterranea

Alexander Ekman – Hammer (for GöteborgsOperans Danskompani)

May 24th – 25th, 2025 Zorlu Performing Arts Center, Istanbul
June 29th – July 5th, 2025 Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona
Approx. 2 h 15 min (including 40 min interval)

A Joy Called Ekman

© Tilo Stengel

In Hammer, a harmonious community shares an altruistic lifestyle inspired by the hippie era. They run, play, sing and enjoy life together. But slowly, the community progresses towards the modern age with its ubiquitous surveillance. The group’s behaviour becomes increasingly egotistical and individualistic. When we return for the second act, we find ourselves in a different place. Now we meet a group of self-conscious people in lonely bubbles. Eventually, unable to cope with all the false pretences, they are forced to relinquish their image-conscious facades and return to an altruistic existence.

Multi-award-winning choreographer Alexander Ekman is bold, unpredictable and innovative, just like GöteborgsOperans Danskompani. His visually powerful work turns a spotlight on contemporary society’s self-image, often with a humorous twist. Ekman has created some 50 works, which have been performed by almost as many companies worldwide. Hammer, a full evening in two acts, is his third work for GöteborgsOperans Danskompani.

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Archive

Pere Seda / L’Esbord – Folk as Queer

March 27th, 2025 Festival Especial Dansa, Tarragona
March 30th, 2025 Festival dansa metropolitana, Barcelona
60 minutes

Reinvent with the Past

© L’Esbord

Folk as Queer is a piece that explores the relationship between collective and individual identity and the influence of cultural heritage through traditional practices such as dance, music and singing. The work seeks a meeting point between the traditional and the dissident body, where they exchange languages and create a new dance together. It is a vibrant reflection on how the past can interact with the present to reinvent itself.  

L’Esbord, created in 2022 in Barcelona, works with traditional Catalan dance and connects it with disciplines such as contemporary dance and folk music. Its performers combine training rooted in traditional dance with professional experience in fields such as jazz, singing and contemporary dance, creating artistic works that blend folklore and innovation.

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Archive

A R I B E L Collective – A años luz

March 27th – 30th, 2025 Festival dansa metropolitana, Barcelona
45 minutes

Between a Human & a Humanoid Robot

© Josep Maria Augé

A años luz explores the relationship between a human and a humanoid robot, envisioning a world where artificial intelligence seamlessly integrates into our society. The piece, blending contemporary dance and performance art, reflects on the rapid pace of technological advancement and the need to balance its benefits with the preservation of our species, learning to manage our growing dependence.

This is the debut creation of A R I B E L Collective, a contemporary dance company founded by Ariadna Jordán and Abel Hernández in 2023. The founders, responsible for both direction and performance, focus on choreography, improvisation, and the exploration of new movements, aiming to enrich the cultural landscape with innovation and creativity.

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DACH region

Thomas Hauert – Troglodyte

March 28th – 30th, 2025 Festival dansa metropolitana, Barcelona
November 17th, 2025 TANZINOLTEN, Olten
April 3rd – 4th, 2026 Théâtre de la Cité internationale, Paris
April 14th, 2026 Le 140, Brussels
60 minutes

A Solo for Himself

© Olivier Miche

In his new solo, Thomas Hauert intends to deepen a creative process already present in his last two creations: making psychology, inner life, emotions and the unconscious a driving force behind movement. The starting point for Troglodyte is a kind of complex psychological enigma, expressed in the working title and subtitle of the solo Zaungast/Zaunkönig, focusing on the experience of the position of the outsider, the one who is not part of the group, the one who looks on from the outside. Zaungast is a German word that describes someone who attends an event to which they were not invited, behind the fence (literally: “guest of the fence”). Zaunkönig, literally “king of the fence”, is the German name for the wren, a small songbird. Tiny but kingly at the same time, it is imagined on the fence, ‘staying on the fence’, in the figurative sense of someone who does not take a stand, does not make up their mind and does not commit themselves accordingly.

The word troglodyte originally refers to a living creature that inhabits a cave or dwelling dug into the ground, like the little bird Zaunkönig/troglodyte. The term Troglodyte also sounds like an insult, one associated with the “Cave Man”, the boorish, uneducated, coarse man.

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France

Samaa Wakim & Samar Haddad King – Losing It

January 23rd – 24th, 2025 Théâtre Orléans, Orléans
January 31st, 2025 Scène Nationale Aubusson, Aubusson
February 4th, 2025 L’empreinte, Tulle
February 7th – 12th, 2025 Théâtre de la Bastille, Paris
March 28th – 29th, 2025 Points communs, Cergy
April 1st – 2nd, 2025 La Coursive, La Rochelle
April 8th, 2025 Scène nationale du Sud-Aquitain, Saint-Jean-de-Luz
April 11th – 12th, 2025 TNC, Barcelona
April 15th – 16th, 2025 Théâtre Auditorium de Poitiers, Poitiers
April 18th, 2025 Le Moulin du Roc, Niort
40 minutes

Between Fear and Hope

© Mohab Mohamed

What if you grew up in a war zone? How does that impact your identity?

“Can you still hear the bombs? I can hear them.”

What if you grew up in a war zone? How do you cope as a child when you are exposed to political conflict on a daily basis?

The choreographer and performer Samaa Wakim grew up in the occupied Palestinian territories. During this solo dance performance, she asks herself how these experiences impact her identity. Through movement and sound, she remembers her youth and the imaginary world she created in order to survive. Driven by her own sounds and live music by Samar Haddad King, she goes back and forth between fear and hope, between sounds that used to scare her and sounds that used to bring her comfort.

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Archive

Javier Martín – Figuras del Umbral

November 14th – 15th, 2024 Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona
70 minutes

Science, Philosophy and Choreography

© Leo López

A piece that invites us to reflect and review the speed of our era, installed in our bodies and fragmenting our attention. Javier Martín invokes the concept of ancestral rituals of “crossing the threshold”, involving the body in a social dance. In the words of the artist: “The famous ‘Guardian of the Threshold’ archetype refers to those figures that take on the forms of our most intimate fears: they guard the threshold, not to deny us entry, but to encourage us to explore the propitious labyrinth that facilitates transformation and, therefore, passage.”

Javier Martín, a choreographer with a scientific background and passion for philosophy, is developing an epistemological and critical research project about the art of movement. He takes a transdisciplinary approach to choreographic creation and dance, drawing on writing, performative conferences, research groups and creative laboratory and tool development. Since starting out in 2005, he has created and showcased more than 30 productions in Spain, France, Russia, Portugal, Ukraine, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala and Uruguay, with fifteen stage shows and an equal number of site-specific projects and special collaborations.

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Archive

Jan Martens – VOICE NOISE

September 24th – 28th, 2024 charleroi danse / la raffinerie, Brussels
October 12th – 13th, 2024 Teatro Argentina, Rome
October 17th – 19th, 2024 mercat de les flors, Barcelona
November 6th, 2024 Theater Rotterdam, Rotterdam
November 19th – 23th, 2024 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
December 11th, 2024 Concertgebouw Brugge, Bruges
December 14th, 2024 Leietheater, Deinze

90 minutes

The Gender of Sound

© Phile Deprez

On a selection of thirteen tracks by women, his dance spares us the illustration. Instead, it acts as a filter to enhance our listening experience.

Léa Poiré

‘Redundant.’ Or more bluntly: ‘Irritating noise.’ This is how the voice of the woman has often been considered from ancient Greek times to today.

VOICE NOISE is inspired by Anne Carson’s essay ‘The Gender of Sound’ (1992), in which she exposes how patriarchal culture has sought to silence women by ideologically associating women’s sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

In VOICE NOISE, some innovative, unknown and/or forgotten women’s voices from the past hundred years of music history are given a stage. By doing so, Jan Martens takes another step in his efforts to shape an alternative canon.

Six dancers respond to recordings in which the human voice can be heard in various guises: humming, soothing, shrieking, whispering, singing. Gradually, they discover their own voice.

Categories
Mediterranea APAC Benelux DACH region

Marina Otero – Kill Me

September 25th – 29th, 2024 Théâtre du Rond-Point, Paris
October 3rd – 4th, 2024 HAU – Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin

October 19th – 20th, 2024 Staatstheater Mainz, Mainz
October 31st – November 2nd, 2024 VIDY, Lausanne
November 5th, 2024 L’onde – Théâtre et Center d’Art, Vélizy
November 12th, 2024 teatr polski (Festival Prapremier), Bydgoszcz
November 21st, 2024 Temporada Alta, Girona
March 19th – 23rd, 2025 dansa metropolitana, Barcelona
March 26th – 29th, 2025 Les Célestins, Lyon
May 16th – 17th, 2025 FITEI, Porto
May 24th, 2025 Spring Performing Arts Festival, Utrecht
May 29th, 2025 Mittenmang Festival, Bremen
June 4th – 7th, 2025 Rising Festival, Melbourne
90 minutes

The Third Chapter of a Poignant Lifelong Project

© Sofia Alazraki

Bringing together Bach and Miley Cyrus, she creates with “Kill Me” a complete and radical work, sometimes unsettling, sometimes subversive, but always impactful.

Olivier Frégaville-Gratian d’Amore

Kill me (2024) is the continuation of Love me (2022) and Fuck me (2020), in turn it is part of the project “ Remember to live ”, in which I intend to present different versions of works until the day of my death.

Entering into the cliché of the midlife crisis, I began to film everything I did: with my heart open 24 hours a day, I recorded everything. 

Until one day I collapsed, I was given a psychiatric diagnosis and I decided to make my next piece out of it. I called on four dancers with mental disorders and Nijinsky, to make a piece that talks about madness for love. 

But let’s say that the topic is about mental health so that it enters the inclusive agenda of the art market. 

Because that is my punishment, having to make works that sell and thus stay alive in the world (of theater). 

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