Helena Waldmann
Every month, dance takes countless journeys—between the Mediterranean and the North Cape, or between Irish and Lithuanian adventures of real bodies for real bodies. Here it is: the constantly updated overview of dance festivals in Europe.
Click on a country you want to travel to, set the month in which you want to visit it.
Click on a country you want to travel to, set the month in which you want to visit it.
Festivals are one thing above all else: highlights for tourism, whether it be a performance festival by Marina Abramovic at Moyland Castle in the Lower Rhine region, a hip-hop battle in Leicester, England, flamenco in Jerez de la Frontera, or the White Nights ballet event in Saint Petersburg. But the most exciting festivals are ones like ConTempo in Kaunas, Lithuania because they are truly dedicated to the audience, both local and foreign.
In the ball pool
The Kaunas tourist office shows tens of thousands of black balls rolling across the street in a promotional trailer: a work of art by Paulius Markevičius and his Be Company. During ConTempo, the black balls were released from a pipe in the National Drama Theater onto the pedestrian zone, instantly transforming the hustle and bustle of business into a dance of passers-by.
The black soft plastic balls were kicked, thrown, swept along by five sweepers, across street intersections, in front of the tires of waiting cars and at the feet of children who were not afraid of the brushes in the ball pit, with parents who had never seen their children happier. Passers-by became children, and beggars and waiters worked shoulder to shoulder, throwing the balls that had broken out of the choreography back into the action… Art that creates images. And an experience: precisely through the choice of locations—a pedestrian zone, a hangar, a forest clearing, a sports hall—so that locals and tourists alike can experience something that only art can offer. Curator Gintarė Masteikaitė has a vision: Art is—above all—an instrument of hospitality.
It is a festival that has been subjected to the political influence and censorship of a patriarchal mayor, but it is also a celebration that interrupts the usual hustle and bustle of the streets and the tranquility of the forest. It is not an event that brings art into a theater, which is a theater anyway. ConTempo seems more like a possible vision for locals of what could be done in their city. Outsiders like to believe that Kaunas surrounds itself with such artistic experiences all year round. A similar mindset once enabled Berlin to present itself as the most visited city in Europe, with more bridges than Venice and more parties than Rome has churches.
“Lulleli”, Europe’s northern festival on the island of Ingøy
But the management teams behind the major festivals think differently. They spend their lives competing for the crème de la crème of dance art. Festivals such as Dance Umbrella in London, Tanz im August in Berlin, RomaEuropa in Rome, the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, the Ruhrtriennale in the Ruhr region, Julidans in Amsterdam, and the Zürcher Theaterspektakel proclaim who enjoys the highest status in the world of dance and declare that the avant-garde is capable of drawing crowds to the box office. For example, under the direction of Tobias Staab, Dance 2025 in Munich served up all the big names that are currently in vogue, and who also appear in tanz.dance with the collective (La)Horde and Trajal Harrel, Ankata, the laboratory of the Faso Dance Théâtre from Burkina Faso, Marcos Morau and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
The thinking in Kaunas is better: Only the initiated know all these big names in the arts who are doing great things. But is it really about worshipping names? In short, no: The experience itself is more important, because it is more memorable.
Dance festivals are uncharted territory for tourism. Conventional city tourism focuses on guided tours of magnificent buildings, sights to see… well-guarded art treasures, streams of tourists lined up in rows, ushered through the Louvre in Paris at precisely scheduled times. This has long been reflected in theaters and their festivals.
My sole memory of the enormous Onassis Stegi theater stage in Athens are the door closers who stare at the audience from the door, poised to immediately punish any attempt to point a cell phone at the stage.
The Making Life in the Ruins festival takes place as part of the regular stage program at the Sophiensäle in Berlin. Its aim, it claims, is to offer the audience the attitude towards life of a generation that urgently wants to break out of the old power structures of control. I remember above all the double admission control, a pink wristband placed on me after my ticket was scanned, which showed the final admission staff once again that I was allowed to enter the stage area. Control is our culture, I think… not art. Not the festival. We are no longer guests of the festival; we are its passengers.
At the “Festspillene i Nord-Norge” in Harstad
If carnival means saying goodbye to meat, does the word ‘festival’ mean no more celebrations? That can’t be. That’s why the trend is toward smaller dance encounters: trips to Harstad in the far north of Norway to experience a Sami dance festival, for example. Or a visit to Santarcangelo in Italy, a pretty place in the hills not far from Rimini, to experience the next generation’s unadulterated outlook on life. This latter event is a magnet for the dance scene, even if you search in vain for it between ‘tagliatelle’ and ‘tuff caves’ on Santarcangelo’s tourism portal. Here, as everywhere else, there is still a lot that can be done to reconcile dance with hospitality and tourism.
