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DACH region

William Forsythe – UNDERTAINMENT

May 23rd – 31st, 2025 Hellerau, Dresden
June 5th – 8th, 2025 Schauspiel Frankfurt, Frankfurt
June 13th – 15th, 2025 De Singel, Antwerp
June 27th, 2025 Theater Freiburg, Freiburg
July 7th – 8th, 2025 Julidans, Amsterdam

September 9th – 10th, 2025 Auditorium Conciliazione, Rome
September 21st – 22nd, 2025 Biennale Danse Lyon, Lyon
October 4th, 2025 Aperto Festival, Reggio Emilia
November 13th – 15th, 2025 Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona
December 4th – 6th, 2025 Kampnagel, Hamburg
Duration: unknown

Double bill with another program

Forsythe Returns to Frankfurt

© Dominik Mentzos

This is a full circle moment. William Forsythe is regarded as one of the most important choreographers of the late 20th century. His innovative approach to the tradition of ballet has opened up directions for dance that would otherwise be difficult to imagine. From 1984 to 2004, Forsythe directed the Ballett Frankfurt and from 2005 to 2015 The Forsythe Company, which was later renamed Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company.

Forsythe is now returning to the place of this legacy of many years and is developing a new work with the company for the first time. Starting from a toolbox of improvisational construction, he creates a structural order which, instead of signifying something else, offers an aesthetic pleasure in itself. Like in a kaleidoscope, patterns emerge that are always unpredictable and surprising yet within a clear framework. The dancers explore the movement system that they themselves form to its limits. The audience is invited to follow this exploration and experience the work as a living, breathing system.

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DACH region Benelux France

Damien Jalet & Kohei Nawa – Mirage for the Ballet du GTG

May 6th – 11th, 2025 Grand Théâtre de Genève, Geneva
June 5th – 7th, 2025 Kampnagel, Hamburg
January 14th – 17th, 2026 Maison de la Danse, Lyon
January 24th, 2026 Festspielhaus St. Pölten, St. Pölten
June 11th – 14th, 2026 De Singel, Antwerp
65 minutes

A Dream of Atmospheric Phenomena

© Gregory Batardon

With Mirage, Damien Jalet offers his very first creation for the Ballet du Grand Théâtre, where he has been an associate artist since 2022. Mirage also constitutes the fourth chapter of his collaboration with Japanese visual artist Kohei Nawa.

Inspired by the phenomenon of mirages and Fata Morgana – optical illusions linked to specific meteorological conditions, caused by light being distorted as it passes through different- temperature layers of air – Damien Jalet and Kohei Nawa depict humanity wandering in a metaphorical desert in search of itself.

Through a series of unpredictable transformations inspired by different mythologies, climatology, botany and entomology, as well as Hayagawari – a Japanese kabuki theatre technique in which performers suddenly transform during a performance –, the piece peels back the performers, layer after layer, exploring an endless variety of physical and emotional states.

Sometimes evoking the spectres of a civilization at the edge of a dry well, sometimes crossed with the dazzling colours and sensuality of tropical nature, Mirage passes through like a moving, fluctuating, waking dream of atmospheric phenomena.

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Archive

Eva Reiter / Michiel Vandevelde – The Rise

March 26th, 2025 Concertgebouw Brugge, Bruges
March 29th – 30th, 2025 Kaaitheater, Brussels
May 21st – 22nd, 2025 Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg
September 17th, 2025 Musiktheatertage, Vienna
90 minutes

An Experimental Opera

© Bea Borgers

In The Rise, composer Eva Reiter and choreographer Michiel Vandevelde focus on the coexistence and interchanges of various worlds as they unfold on stage successively. Thereby it is the process of translation that lead to the emergence of such new worlds. Throughout translating and re-contextualizing symbols, signs, gestures and sounds, new languages are created that eventually transform our perspective on a particular world.

The Rise is based on the poetry of Nobel prize winner Louise Glück. Specifically her publication Averno serves as the main material for the libretto.  Averno, a crater lake in Italy, was believed to be the entrance gate to the underworld. In her poetry Glück connects and interchanges the two worlds of the living and the dead, returning from one to another and evokes images of life and death, of eternity and the profane. Similarly to the surface of the lake which serves as a permeable membrane into that parallel world, we will create parallel and intermediate worlds throughout the way these poems are performed.

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Oona Doherty – Specky Clark

February 6th – 7th, 2025 VIERNULVIER, Ghent
March 7th, 2025 Festspielhaus St. Pölten, St. Pölten
April 24th – 25th, 2025 Lieu Unique, Nantes
May 9th – 10th, 2025 Sadler’s Wells, London

May 14th – 17th, 2025 Dublin Dance Festival, Dublin
June 24th – 27th, 2025 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
August 13th – 16th, 2025 Kampnagel, Hamburg
60 minutes

Meat, Sorrow and Irish Sounds

© Luca Truffarelli

Part fiction, part biographical, all elements are overlapping, and it will become difficult to determine what’s myth and what’s reality. 

It goes back to a time when families worked in the abattoirs of Belfast. Pigs in the garden of New lodge.

There’s something in the meat of me, bloodline, there is a pink fleshy vulnerability to me, to dancing, there is a violence in me.

This new show will follow the story of Oona’s Great Great Grandfather Specky Clark and his arrival in Belfast.

For this piece which will be unfolding in a series of theatrical images, Oona Doherty will collaborate with many faithful and new partners. The production features music from Irish band Lankum, Gavino Murgia and David Holmes & Raven Violet. Maxime Jerry Fraisse is sound designer, Irish playwright Enda Walsh is dramaturg, Sabine Dargent is set designer, Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust is costume designer and long-time collaborator John Gunning is lighting designer. The piece will be performed by an international cast of 9 dancers.

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Archive

Harald Beharie – Batty Bwoy

  • November 16th – 17th, 2024 Bari International Gender festival, Bari
  • November 21st – 23rd, 2024 Sophiensæle, Berlin
  • December 6th – 7th, 2024 Kampnagel, Hamburg
  • March 22nd, 2025 Artdanthé, Vanves
  • March 24th, 2025 Festival Le Grand Bain, Roubaix
  • March 27th, 2025 STUK, Leuven
  • April 1st – 3rd, 2025 Bora Bora, Aarhus
  • April 8th – 9th, 2025 Dansehallerne, Copenhagen
  • May 20th – 22nd, 2025 Tramway/Buzzcut Glasgow
  • May 28th – 31st, 2025 FTA, Montreal
  • June 7th, 2025 RCI93, Aubervilliers

75 minutes

A Captivating Solo

© Tale Hendnes

There are hints of dancehall dutty wine whirls, or sexy pelvis swaying. The movements are always ambivalent: they range between vulnerable, violent and ecstatic, yet become mechanical and ‘empty’ through numerous repetitions.

Jelena Mihelčić

Batty Bwoy is a solo performance in collaboration with Karoline Bakken Lund, Veronica Bruce, Jassem Hindi and Ring van Mobius.

Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican term “ Batty Bwoy” (litteraly, butt boy), slang for a queer person, the work twists and turns myths to invoke demonic sensitivities and charming cruelties, unfolding vulnerable possibilities in an interplay of consciousness and naivety. The horror and joy of Batty Bwoy, inherent to queer blackness, is unmasked. 

Scrutinizing the absurdity of a queer monstrosity, Batty Bwoy articulates the porosity of bodies and languages, their mouths swallowing and regurgitating the corporal fictions projected onto their skins.  

Batty Bwoy attacks and embraces sedimented narratives around the fear of the queer body as a perverse and deviant figure. The expression “Batty Bwoy” is used to evoke an ambivalent being that exists in the threshold of the precarious body, liberated power, joy and batty energy!

The work has found inspiration in mythologies, disgusting stereotypes, feelings and fantasies of the queer body and identities, homophobic dancehall lyrics, 70s Giallo films from Italy, resilient “gully queens” and queer voices in Norway and Jamaica that have visited and taken part of the process.

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Sonya Lindfors – ONE DROP

October 25th-26th, 2024 Kampnagel, Hamburg
110 minutes

A Stage Awakening the Ghosts

© Tuukka Ervasti

ONE DROP is a speculative summoning, a decolonial dream, an autopsy of the Western stage and an operetta. Slipping in meanings, leaking through different categories the work dives into the poetics and politics of relations, creating a stage that awakens the ghosts, connections lost or forgotten.

The title of the work refers to two separate frameworks, the one drop rhythm which is a reggae style drum beat as well as to the one drop rule of the Race Separation Act, created in the United States in the early 1900s, according to which a single drop of “Black blood” made a person “Black” despite their appearance. Through its multiple starting points the work interrogates the ghosts of the Western stage and its entanglements and relationalities to capitalism, coloniality and modernity.

ONE DROP continues Lindfors’ series of works dealing with power, representation and Black body politics.

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Archive

Eisa Jocson & Venuri Perera – Magic Maids

September 20th – 22nd, 2024 HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin
October 4th – 6th, 2024 Esplanade, Singapore
October 11th – 12th, 2024 Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna
March 7th – 9th, 2025 Kampnagel, Hamburg
March 14th – 16th, 2025 Arsenic, Lausanne

March 20th – 21st, 2025 Maillon, Strasbourg
March 25th – 26th, 2025 Points Communs, Cergy
March 29th, 2025 La Briqueterie, Vitry-sur-Seine
May 3rd – 4th, 2025 Festival DDD, Porto
May 22nd – 23rd, 2025 Spring Performing Arts Festival, Utrecht
June 21st – 22nd, 2025 Festival Theaterformen, Hannover
June 29th, 2025 Belluard Bollwerk Festival, Fribourg
July 4th – 6th, 2025 National Arts Festival, Makhanda

July 12th – 13th, 2025 Santarcangelo Festival, Santarcangelo di Romagna
80 minutes

Two Figures Engaged in the Ritual Act of Sweeping

© National Gallery Singapore

Interweaving ritual, pageantry, performance and possession, Magic Maids presents an encounter with two figures engaged in the ritual act of sweeping. The broom, a domestic tool for cleaning and the vehicle of the witch, becomes a symbol of both oppression and resistance. It is an extension of the body and a portal for metamorphosis. The art workers and their brooms exist in a continuous state of becoming.

Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera are from the Philippines and Sri Lanka respectively, two countries known for their significant export of domestic workers. Their collaboration began in 2022 when they noticed the absence of women at Basel Museum of Pharmaceutical History in Switzerland. This observation sparked their investigation of the historical persecution of witches; in Europe and its implications for the exploitation of female labour in colonised regions. They discovered that the accusation of witchcraft continues to be a tool for persecuting migrant workers from the Global South.

Magic Maids is a bodily response to their grappling with these complex entanglements. They call upon practices of incantation and intention, using their bodies to traverse multiple territories: physical, conceptual, transnational, emotional, and gendered. The labour in performance enables an embodied inquiry into questions of representation, political subjecthood and histories of oppression. Having individually presented solo work across international festivals and platforms that follows this line of inquiry, Jocson and Perera come together for the first time to sweep out and unsettle oppressive power structures. Rewilding the domestic, they aim to release, reclaim, rejoice, and reconnect with the primal energies.

Magic Maids is an invitation to witness and reflect on the visibility of the working body, the power of female solidarity, and the enduring impact of historical injustices on modern labour practices.

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Stefan Kaegi / Sasha Waltz & Guests – Mirror Neurons

August 29th – September 1st, 2024 radialsystem, Berlin
November 23rd – 24th, 2024, Tanz Köln, Cologne
November 28th – December 1st, 2024 Kampnagel, Hamburg
December 13th – 15th, 2024 TEATR ŁAŹNIA NOWA, Kraków
80 minutes

A Documentary Dance Evening with an Audience

© Bernd Uhlig

This piece is an experiment, conducted anew in every performance. It revolves around the human brain and its relationship with the body. The audience is an essential part of the experiment, because its members are invited not only to watch the dancers but also to find their own groove, to participate from their seats as an active part of a collective system, and to feel the sensation of belonging to a vast hive brain.

Spiegelneuronen (Mirror Neurons) marks the first joint project with Sasha Waltz & Guests. Following on from Andrew Schneider’s remains in 2020, this project continues the dance company’s openness to new styles as well as its commitment to broaden its repertory through artistic exploration and interdisciplinary cooperation with international artists. The collectives come from markedly different artistic directions, but are equally interested in the unconventional use of space and in interdisciplinary work. In this first collaboration, Stefan Kaegi will join forces with both the dancers from Sasha Waltz & Guests and the audience for an exploration of the relationship between the individual and society, conducted through the medium of dance in front of a large mirror.