On a stage covered with a thick layer of earth and bathed in light stand fourteen dancers – all different in age and dance background. Movements flow from one body to the next, gradually building to a wild climax. The result is a tactile experience that shares loneliness with fiction: how is it that you can be alone even when you’re in a group?

Does gender have a voice, does skin have a race? Using drag, vogueing, striptease, YouTube tutorials as well as the triadic ballet by Oskar Schlemmer, seven bodies and many more objects try out new constellations, like surrealist ready-mades. With a great sense of irony, Escape Act presents hyper-stereotyped gender identities, only to deconstruct them completely.

People with physical disabilities are often more associated with stationariness than with movement. In Every Body Electric, Doris Uhlich refutes this idea with vitality and vibrancy. You can expect a fascinating dialogue between the human and the mechanical in which very personal dance styles vary from explosive to gently poetic.

Tafukt/The Sun/Athena is a dance solo and the first part of a trilogy focused on epistemologies and mythologies of the Tamazigh – the indigenous population of Northern Africa. How can we challenge the current canon? Can performance function as a tool of resistance? Radouan Mriziga seeks to create a space for reflections on the past in order to strive for a more inclusive future.

Daniel Linehan creates a choreography in which the lighting, the scenography, the costumes, the movement, and the music each dominate the stage in turn, and then fade to make space for the others. This constant cycle of emergence and disappearance creates an interplay in which unnoticed elements suddenly demand your attention, eliciting unsuspected moments of wonder.

Water Will (in Melody) is a devised choreographic work for four performers that uses melodrama as a point of departure. Wrestling with language and notions of ‘the will’, this dystopian fantasy becomes a space for negotiating desire, imagination, and feelings of an encroaching end.

Rétrospective is Jérôme Bel’s subjective reflection on his own work. He chose eighteen dance fragments from his video archive. Through meticulous editing, he has used them to reconstruct the development of his thinking about dance. By emphasizing the links between dance and politics, he foregrounds central themes in his work. After the film screening, there will be an extended conversation with the choreographer.