Elisa Frasson

In the hot month of July, the 2024 Biennale Danza festival edition entitled ‘We Humans’ sought to give space to human beings’ need to communicate through movement. 

While Italy's football team lost resoundingly, but not unexpectedly, against Switzerland, renowned Berlin-based choreographer Constanza Macras brought an engaging and emotional show back to the stage of the Volksbühne. 

With Overture by Spanish choreographer Marcos Morau and Angel's Atlas by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, the Staatsballett Berlin and its intendant Christian Spuck present an evening that reconfirms how dance is able to give something back to the world.

Approximate Sonata 2016 (1996, 2016), One Flat Thing, reproduced (2000), and Blake Works I (2016) are the pieces by star choreographer William Forsythe that were premiered by Staatsballett Berlin. 

Attending Tanztage Berlin is like diving into a warm, enveloping magma of varied dance vocabulary, where the fluidity of the aesthetic codes presented goes hand in hand with tackling urgent current political themes. 

The 35th edition of Tanz im August (TiA) marks Ricardo Carmona’s first as artistic director. Carmona is a former dance and performance curator for Hebbel Am Ufer, presenting a programme that reconsiders the conceptual and physical versatility of contemporary choreographic gesture through the search for new narratives, facing the current climate, and political urgency.

 

Appointed as the new director of the Tanz im August festival after nine editions curated by Virve Sutinen, Berlin-based Ricardo Carmona talks about his curatorial perspective for the 2023 edition, interweaving curatorial issues, biographical elements, and global challenges.

After experiencing the first couple of days, I returned to catch some glimpses from the third and final week of the festival, including the powerful TAO Dance Theatre, recently awarded the 2023 Silver Lion, Biennale College Choreographers’ well put together pieces, and the choreography for objects by Andrea Salustri.

Located in the stunning buildings of the Arsenale di Venezia, the Teatro Malibran, and Ca' Giustinian (Venice), and Teatro del Parco (Mestre), the Biennale Danza’s three-week programme represents a festival with an international character...

As its last première of this spring season, Staatsballett Berlin presented a Stravinsky double-bill, featuring two of the composer’s masterpieces, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, under the choreographic signatures of Marco Goecke and Pina Bausch.

Messa da Requiem is a 2016 piece created by German choreographer Christian Spuck for Ballet Zurich based on the well-known music by Giuseppe Verdi. 

At the end of November, Berliner dance collective laborgras together with ensemble Continuum presented Das Fest to a sold-out Theater im Delphi, a dance piece bringing contemporary dance and Baroque music together.