Categories
Benelux

Lia Rodrigues – Borda

  • May 28th – 31st, 2025 Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels
  • June 3rd – 4th, 2025 PACT Zollverein, Essen
  • June 7th – 8th, 2025 One Dance Festival, Plovdiv
  • June 16th – 17th, 2025 MUFFATWERK, Munich
  • June 20th – 21st, 2025 WIENER FESTWOCHEN, Vienna
  • July 10th – 12th, 2025 Julidans, Amsterdam
  • August 27th – 28th, 2025 Tanz im August, Berlin
  • September 6th & 8th, 2025 Biennale Danse Lyon, Lyon
  • September 12th – 17th, 2025 Centquatre-Paris, Paris
  • September 19th – 21st, 2025 Théâtre Chaillot, Paris
  • September 24th, 2025 L’Azimut, Antony | Châtenay-Malabry
  • October 10th – 11th, 2025 Romaeuropa Festival, Rome
  • May 22nd – 23rd, 2026 DE SINGEL, Antwerp

60 minutes

Comfort and Hope

© Sammi Landweer

Borda in Portuguese refers to embroidery, decoration, but also to a border, the periphery, something that separates. Geographical and political borders create contradictions: hospitality and hostility, native and non-native. Who belongs and who is excluded, who has a right to exist? Metaphorically, the word ‘borda’ also means imagination, the ability to cross borders, to transcend.

With a new generation of dancers, choreographer Lia Rodrigues weaves a porous embroidery of liquid otherness, with edges that fray, float and dance. In her signature style, starting from the energy of the collective and using simple materials like textiles and plastic, she creates a unique ballet between bodies and matter whose recipe only Rodrigues seems to know. Bodies clump together into constellations, form masses and separate again. With great care, what was separated is brought back together. The result is a succession of powerful images and colourful tableaux. 

Rodrigues, after the savoured large-venue productions Fúria and Encantado, once again blankets us in comfort and hope.

Categories
Archive

Cherish Menzo – FRANK

May 22nd – 26th, 2025 Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels
June 1st, 2025 One Dance Festival, Plovdiv
June 17th – 18th, 2025 PACT Zollverein, Essen
July 3rd – 4th, 2025 Montpellier Danse, Montpellier
July 9th – 10th, 2025 Julidans, Amsterdam

September 24th – 25th, 2025 Theater Rotterdam, Rotterdam
October 10th – 11th, 2025 Festival Actoral, Marseille
October 22nd, 2025 Take Me Somewhere festival, Glasgow
November 10th – 11th, 2025 Moving in November, Helsinki

Duration: unknown

Cherish Menzo’s New Work

© Bas de Brouwer

Choreographer Cherish Menzo examines the figure of the monster in FRANK —short for Frankenstein. More than (re)producing a physical or visual portrayal of the monster, she is researching the monstrous as an embodiment of beliefs and narratives that terrify and horrify, and yet also attract us. Distortion is a choreographic leitmotif used to generate movement material and as a tool to devour the dance and loosen its structure. Cherish Menzo investigates the action of decay and how something gradually breaking down and becoming less or worse can affect one’s gestures.

The performance space fabulates on the Baka Gorong, a place located at the back of the former plantations and in front of the wetlands, where enslaved people in Suriname secretly went to carry out Winti rituals – demonized under Dutch colonial rule – and to consider fleeing.

Categories
Mediterranea Eastern Europe Benelux France

Christos Papadopoulos – My Fierce Ignorant Step

  • May 8th – 18th, 2025 Onassis Stegi, Athens
  • May 30th, 2025 One Dance Festival, Plovdiv
  • June 27th – 28th, 2025 Festival de Marseille, Marseille
  • July 2nd – 3rd, 2025 Julidans, Amsterdam
  • November 14th – 16th, 2025 Romaeuropa Festival, Rome
  • November 19th, 2025 Aperto Festival, Reggio Emilia
  • December 3rd, 2025 Concertgebouw Brugge, Bruges
  • December 6th, 2025 Theater Rotterdam, Rotterdam
  • January 8th – 9th, 2026 PAWILON TAŃCA, Warsaw
  • January 24th – 25th, 2026 TMP, Porto
  • May 24th – 30th, 2026 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris

60 minutes

Christos Papadopoulos’ Most Personal Work

© Christos Papadopoulos

With My Fierce Ignorant Step (Working Title), Papadopoulos seeks to consciously process the influence that “Axion Esti”—the monumental work by Mikis Theodorakis founded on the poetry of Odysseas Elytis—exerted on him, exploring the extent to which sound and speech can dilate and reach a state of abstraction that alludes to that of a movement: a lifted arm, an oscillating body, a trembling leg.

For the choreographer, the first impulse for the creation of “My Fierce Ignorant Step (Working Title)” is grounded in aural memories of his childhood and younger age, memories that he shares with many other Greeks: collective memories that are connected with the fate of this country, even if this is not immediately apparent. Is it possible to work on a text with the same composition principles applied to the choreography of a body? How close to words can a body come, and vice versa? Can this turn into a shared, transparent, and simple experience?