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Benelux

TAO Dance Theater – 16 & 17

  • July 25th – 26th, 2025 Biennale Danza, Venice
  • August 9th, 2025 ImPulsTanz, Vienna
  • October 12th – 13th, 2025 Dialog Festival, Wrocław
  • October 16th – 17th, 2025 SPAF, Seoul
  • March 4th, 2026 Amare, The Hague
  • March 7th, 2026  International Theater Amsterdam, Amsterdam
  • March 10th, 2026 schrit_tmacher Festival, Heerlen
  • March 14th, 2026 Stadsschouwburg Utrecht, Utrecht
  • March 17th, 2026 SPOT Groningen, Groningen

70 minutes

The Latest Chapters of Numerical Series

© Fan Xi

This double bill from the TAO Dance Theater’s Numerical Series begins with a celebration of the dragon, a bringer of good look in China. Inspired by the Chinese dragon dance Loong, sixteen black-clad dancers from Beijing swirl through colourful light in the first piece, 16. And the seventeen bodies in 17, wearing black and white, activate their voices along with their movements, thereby turning themselves into a “mobile sound system”. With his minimalist yet virtuoso dance style, choreographer Tao Ye has found a path between tradition and futurism that brings the body and the mind into harmony.

TAO Dance Theatre’s choreographic Series of Numbers began in 2008 and has been invited onto the most important stages of the world, from the Lincoln Center Art Festival of New York to Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, as well as the Sydney Opera House and the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. Its minimalist aesthetic further codified Tao Ye and Duan Ni’s method, achieving an exasperated repetition that seeks truth in the body.

Categories
DACH region France

Nina Laisné, François Chaignaud, Nadia Larcher – Último Helecho

  • July 19th – 21st, 2025 ImPulsTanz, Vienna
  • August 23rd – 25th, 2025  Ruhrtriennale, Essen
  • September 9th, 2025 La Bâtie Festival de Genève, Annemasse
  • September 12th, 2025 Oriente Occidente Festival, Rovereto
  • September 17th – 18th, 2025 Biennale Danse Lyon, Lyon
  • October 1st – 3rd, 2025 Musica Festival, Strasbourg
  • October 5th, 2025 La Filature, Mulhouse
  • October 14h – 15th, 2025  Les 2 scènes, Besançon
  • November 28th – 30th, 2025 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
  • December 6ht, 2025 Concertgebouw, Bruges
  • January 24th – 25th, 2026 Berliner Festspiele, Berlin

70 minutes

A Celebration of
Fluid Identities

© Nina Laisné

As an international co-production, artists Nina Laisné and François Chaignaud and singer Nadia Larcher have developed Último helecho, a performance that is carried by music, singing and dance at once and where Baroque meets South American folklore and mythology.

Último helecho is the second cooperation between François Chaignaud and Nina Laisné following Romances inciertos, un autre Orlando, for which they invented a special, poetically artistic cosmos: Drag and dance, old Spanish songs and queer hero*ine narratives were interwoven into a celebration of fluid identities and forms of expression.

While François Chaignaud also sings on stage, Nadia Larcher, who is a celebrated singer in South America, will try out the folklore dances of her native lands together with him on stage for the first time. The multifaceted repertoire of traditional music and dances from Argentina – ranging from chacareras via the majestic zambas to the huaynos – will serve as the underpinnings of the performance. The duo will be accompanied live on stage by six musicians whose artistic roots lie partly in Baroque and partly in folklore.

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Archive

Akram Khan & Manal AlDowoyan – Thikra: Night of Remembering

June 22nd – 24th, 2025 Montpellier Danse, Montpellier
July 29th – August 1st, 2025 ImPulsTanz, Vienna
August 17th, 2025 Santander International Festival, Santander

September 19th – 21st, 2025 Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, Luxembourg
September 26th – 28th, 2025 Théâtre Sénart, Lieusaint
October 2nd – 18th, 2025 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
October 28th – November 1st, 2025 Sadler’s Wells, London
November 5th – 6th, 2025 Romaeuropa Festival, Rome
November 11th – 12th, 2025 Berliner Festspiele, Berlin

November 19th – 20th, 2025 Tanz Köln, Cologne
65 minutes

No Future without a Past

© Camilla Greenwell

Thikra: Night of Remembering is Akram Khan Company’s latest production created in collaboration with award-winning visual artist Manal AlDowayan.

Thikra draws inspiration from AlUla’s ancient landscapes, mythology and cultural heritage to evoke the idea that “without a past, there is no future.”

Blending Bharatanatyam with contemporary, the piece is performed by a collective of all-female voices, accompanied by an original score from Aditya Prakash, sound design by Gareth Fry, lighting by Zeynep Kepekli and dramaturgy by Blue Pieta.

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Archive

Damien Jalet – Thrice

June 21st – 22nd, 2025 Den Norske Opera & Ballett, Oslo
July 26th, 2025 Kalamata International Dance Festival, Kalamata
July 28th & 30th, 2025 ImPulsTanz, Vienna
September 24th – 25th, 2025 Bærum Kulturhus, Sandvika
60 minutes

Damien Jalet’s Triptych

© JR

The triple bill Thrice consists of the three pieces GustsMédusés, and Brise-lames.

Gusts, the first section, is about air—breath and movement – and pays homage to the force that carries us. With live music by saxophonist Bendik Giske, Gusts becomes a dialogue between body and sound, highlighting the tension between gravity and centripetal force.

Médusés, the second chapter, takes its cue from the myth of Medusa and the idea of being petrified by a gaze. Here, bodies resist – between rigidity and fluidity, the individual and the collective.

Brise-lames, the final part, transports us underwater. Created in collaboration with artist JR and Japanese pianist Koki Nakano, this piece, which has only been available to the public as a film directed by Louise Narboni in close collaboration with Damien Jalet, will now be performed live for the first time. The movements here are slow – like a ship approaching shore, or waves reaching land.

Thrice
 is a work in constant motion – a story of bodies attempting not to solidify. This project has allowed Damien Jalet to return to the founding principles of his work, a minimalist exploration of movement. His more recent creations have operated on a very grand scale, with ambitious scenography and apparatus. In Thrice, complexity lies elsewhere: in the movements, lights and sound, and in the search of how combination, association and repetition might generate new emotions.

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

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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Archive

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins – New Work

February 21st – 22nd, 2025 Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna
February 28th – March 1st, 2025 PACT Zollverein, Essen
April 3rd – 6th, 2025 Arsenic, Lausanne
duration: unknown

Rare and Radical Beauty

© Mark Blower

In his artistic practice, Alex Baczyński-Jenkins explores affects, queer sensuality, the collective and the suspension of time. He comes back to Arsenic with a new group performance dedicated to the finitude. Whether it’s through a grand finale, the erotic erasing of the limits, or through ecstatic surrender. The final result is an intense dance looking for an expression of the intensities of the end, of the endings. In the end, the result is almost tactile, raw and minimal.

The artist, co-founder and member of the queer feminist collective Kem, laureate to the prestigious Frieze Artist Award in 2018, offers here, once more, a piece of rare and radical beauty.

Categories
Archive

TAO Dance Theater – 13 & 14

October 12th, 2024 Theater Bonn Opera House, Bonn
October 16th-19th, 2024 Théâtre de la Ville, Paris
October 25th-26th, 2024 Teatro Central, Seville
October 30th, 2024 Teatro Ariosto, Reggio Emilia
November 5th-6th, 2024 International Theater Amsterdam, Amsterdam
November 13th, 2024 Le théâtre de Saint-Nazaire, Saint-Nazaire
November 15th-16th, 2024 Théâtre de Cornouaille, Quimper

November 21st, 2024 Le Quartz, Bres
July 30th, 2025 Civitanova Danza, Civitanova Marche
August 6th, 2025 ImPulsTanz, Vienna

75 minutes incl. intermission

Winners of Silver Lion, BIENNALE DANZA 2023

© Duan Ni

TAO Dance Theater is a Chinese dance company based in Beijing. Founded in 2008 by the choreographers Tao Ye, Duan Ni and by the producer Wang Hao, the company has an innovative approach to movement, a body technique known as “Circular Movement System”. At its roots is the idea of pure dance, achieved through the “ritualistic repetition of the body’s natural movements”, invoking the spectators’ capacity to concentrate on the essential nature of the repeated gesture, devoid of any ornament.

TAO Dance Theatre’s choreographic Series of Numbers began in 2008 and has been invited onto the most important stages of the world, from the Lincoln Center Art Festival of New York to Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, as well as the Sydney Opera House and the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. Its minimalist aesthetic further codified Tao Ye and Duan Ni’s method, achieving an exasperated repetition that seeks truth in the body.

13 and 14 explore different themes, respectively involving 13 and 14 dancers on stage following the habitual pattern of the series. 13 develops along a three-part scheme, exploring three different ways that bodies relate: in the solo, the duet, the ensemble. Starting from the unity of the ensemble, the choreographer progressively fragments the dancers into different formations between ralenti and sudden accelerationsreflecting the “complexity of the physical world, where one is continuously colliding, coming together and apart, falling and bouncing back” within a choreographic form that is both rigorous and open.

A study of rhythm, 14 relies on rapid changes of movement that bring out the full range of possibilities between stasis and movement. As the result of a complex dynamism, 14 takes the vocabulary of the “Circular Movement System” to the extreme: Points, lines and planes that intersect in space bring the work back to pure movement, deploying the full range of possibilities”.

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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.