Europe’s perpetual dance festival calendar

There are festivals for contemporary circus, for young ballet dancers, for hip-hop battles. There are festivals for flamenco and contemporary dance. And there are festivals that are made for the audience: for locals as well as visitors. Festivals that feel like an experience. ConTempo in Kaunas, Lithuania, is one such festival.

The event is organized by the wonderfully energetic Gintarė Masteikaitė. She invited a group to perform on the banks of one of the two rivers that converge in Kaunas, the Neris and the Nemunas. Lithuanian choreographer Aira Nagineviūtė and her colleagues Erika Vizbaraitė and Arūnas Adomaitis wanted to hang a Kalashnikov in a tree. Dangling from the branches, they would stare into the eyes of the current threat.

But it didn’t happen. The mayor’s office informed festival director Gintarė Masteikaitė that allowing a performance of this piece, with the telling title “Russian Roulette,” would result in the cancellation of all funding for the festival next year. The mayor of Klaipėda on the coast of Lithuania had already decided the same. Both dignitaries are former militiamen, i.e., police officers from the days when Russia still ruled the country. Both maintain good relations with their former employer.

Nevertheless, Gintarė Masteikaitė had no choice but to give in. The disinvited choreographer Aira Nagineviūtė wrote: “Just a year ago, this very performance took place on the Mindaugas Bridge in Vilnius. The decision by the city councils of Klaipėda and Kaunas to refuse permission for the performance is truly alarming. It feels as if the voice of dance has been silenced—something I didn’t even experience during the Soviet era. To experience such a setback now is both painful and incomprehensible.”

Yet the ConTempo festival doesn’t feel like a victim of censorship, but rather like an adventure playground. In the middle of Kaunas, you enter a former police gymnasium, where the mayors of Kaunas and Klaipėda presumably also worked out.

Now the audience whirls around the sun-drenched wooden floor of the historic gymnasium with dancers Krišjānis Sants and Erik Eriksson until everyone—dancers and spectators alike—is dizzy. Sants and Eriksson join hands crosswise and spin in circles. The audience dodges, seeks cover from the force, but soon dares to come closer and seeks to influence the orbit of the Lithuanian-Swedish couple, to exercise democracy in a place that no tourist ever gets to see.

ConTempo in Kaunas is a journey through the city that surpasses any ordinary sightseeing tour. The audience reaches the remotest corners of the old city, crossing the Aleksotas Bridge, the “longest” bridge in the world, though it spans a mere 256 meters. But rather than the physical measurement, the length in question here refers to the time that passes when crossing it. Once upon a time, the Julian calendar was used here on the former border with Russia, while the Prussian side opposite used the Gregorian calendar. Crossing the bridge meant overcoming a time difference of thirteen days. From here, the tour continues past a traffic island with shopping centers and a posh gated community to an enchanted restaurant, where visitors can enjoy a delicious meal before entering a park. There, in front of a huge screen, they experience the El Conde de Torrefiel company from Barcelona: In the middle of the performance, the dancers drive a flock of sheep through the audience. Unforgettable.

Unforgettable because you remember the festival itself more clearly than the individual performances. Dance festivals like ConTempo are beacons of tourism. They invite you to enjoy a different kind of travel, away from the usual city tours with shopping and visits to churches, old towns, and castles. They bring people together, allowing them to physically feel what the cities and their cultures are really like.

The Kaunas tourism office proudly shows tens of thousands of black balls rolling down the street in a promotional trailer: a work of art by Paulius Markevičius and his Be Company. During ConTempo, the black balls the let the black balls flow out of a pipe from the National Drama Theater onto the pedestrian zone, balls that 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. For curator Gintarė Masteikaitė, art is—above all—an instrument of hospitality.

This festival is 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 gives locals a glimpse of what might be possible 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 parties than Rome has churches.

But the management teams behind the major festivals think differently. Big cities make big festivals: 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.

Art and control

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 type of mass organization has also become prevalent 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. But what do I remember? 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.

If carnival means farewell to meat, does festival then mean, translated literally, no more celebration? That can’t be. “ConTempo” in Kaunas shows that the scavenger hunt from dance event to dance event, from the city center to remote parks, can very well reconcile dance with hospitality and tourism. Less obviously, this is not about attendance figures, but about the effects that cultural events actually have on the city and on tourism. Those who later rave about dancing people, not historic buildings, tell us much more about a place than any pretty vacation brochure. The trend is toward smaller dance encounters: trips to Harstad in the far north of Norway to experience a Sami dance gathering, for example. Or to Santarcangelo in Italy, a place in the hills not far from Rimini, to experience the next generation’s unadulterated outlook on life – a magnet for the dance scene, even if you search in vain for it between tagliatelle and tuff caves on Santarcangelo’s tourism portal.