The dance festivals of Europe

Journalism thrives on scandal—and it can certainly be found here. Lithuania is located in the Baltic region, with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad to the west and Belarus to the east. All it takes is one dance step to cause a scandal.

EU and NATO member Lithuania is on the front line and lives on trade with Russia. Every sanction against Moscow’s rulers finds a loophole here. Fish for Kaliningrad is big business for this Baltic Sea state

Visvaldas Matijošaitis is the mayor of Kaunas, a small town in the middle of Lithuania. He founded the Vičiūnų grupe, which has become Russia’s second largest supplier of fish. A company like this needs good connections, and he has them. The powerful city leader is already in his fourth term, which feels like an eternity. The annual ConTempo festival in Kaunas is paid for with “his” money—municipal funding. The event is organized by the wonderfully energetic Gintarė Masteikaitė. For this year’s festival, 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 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. Period. 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.

At this, a murmur went through the small town. Of course, the mayor of Kaunas had long since transferred his large fish and canned food trading company to his son. Just as the festival was censored, the EU accused at least one subsidiary of the Vičiūnų group of transporting eleven goods subject to EU sanctions to Russia, including wheel bearings needed for the manufacture of tanks.

Nevertheless, festival director Gintarė Masteikaitė had no choice but to give in. The disinvited choreographer Aira Nagineviūtė wrote to me: “Just a year ago, this very performance took place on the Mindaugas Bridge in Vilnius without issue. 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 step backwards now is both painful and incomprehensible.”

Let’s take a closer look at the ConTempo festival: It’s an adventure playground. In the middle of the city, you enter a former police gym, 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 and allow them to physically experience what cities and their cultures are really like.