Europe’s perpetual dance festival calendar

Click on a country you want to travel to, set the month in which you want to visit it.

For guidance only:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.