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Waiting for "Guernica Guernica" (20 September 2025, Jahrhunderthalle - Bochum) Can war be depicted on stage? The performing arts certainly find a thousand and one ways to tell a story, but can they convey the horrors and devastation of war and the sociology and psychology of the victors and losers without being didactic, informative or descriptive? FC Bergman, the Belgian theatre collective whose work I have followed for many years, successfully answered this question with their wordless performance Guernica Guernica, which premiered in the Bochum Jahrhunderthalle from 19 to 21 September 2025, during the final week of the 2025 Ruhrtriennale, directed by Belgian director Ivo van Hove. I will now attempt to explain how they achieved this through my impressions of the performance.  FC Bergman chose to depict the war using the Guernica incident. It's easy to understand why. Guernica is the name of a Basque town in Spain where a state bombed its own civilian population f...

Waiting for Der Freischütz Bregenzer Festspiele, Bregenz (7 August 2025) Waiting for  Der fliegende Holländer   Oper im Steinbruch ,  St. Margarethen  (8 August 2025) If there is another country in the world besides Italy where opera is held in such high esteem today, it must be Austria. Much like in Italy, opera reaches the masses in Austria during the summer months through open-air festivals. Around the same time as the Salzburg Festival — the oldest and arguably the world's most prestigious performing arts organisation — two open-air opera festivals take place in July and August, this year one for the 79th time and the other for the 29th: Bregenzer Festspiele (Bregenz Festival) and Oper im Steinbruch (Opera in the Quarry), formerly known as Opernfestspiele St. Margarethen (St. Margarethen Opera Festival). Both festivals boast exceptional venues: the first is on the water, on the shores of Lake Constance; the second is in the countryside, in a Roman-era quarry at t...

© Willy Vainqueur Guadeloupean dancer and choreographer Max Diakok discovered the traditional dance form of Gwoka in 1978 while studying advanced judo. In the following years, Diakok studied modern jazz, modern ka, classical, and contemporary dance in Toulon, France, and worked with choreographers such as Paolo Campos, Germaine Acogny, Jean François Durouré, Pierre N'Doumbé, Christian Bourigault, and Norma Claire, as well as theater directors such as Luc Saint-Éloy and Jean Michel Martial of the Théâtre de l'Air Nouveau. In 1996, Diakok founded his own dance company, Compagnie Boukouso, in Saint-Denis, Paris.  Keeping the search for new forms of movement in mind and eager to acquire other technical tools, Max Diakok continues to utilize the Gwoka movement vocabulary in his work, focusing primarily on contemporary dance, African dance, and body techniques such as yoga, buto, and contact. He was awarded the title of Knight of Arts and Letters in France in 2015.  Max Diakok's ...

© Frank Sperling Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim are conceptual artists exploring urgent questions around the social value of art, digital labour, and the political potential of games. Mixing their backgrounds in performance, philosophy, psychology, and digital media, their collaborations have manifested in video games, participatory installations, digital archives, and card games. These include videocan, Canadian national video archive of performance, and culturecapital, a performing arts economy trading card game.  asses.masses, their major piece, is a custom video game designed to be played from beginning to end by a live audience, one person at a time. It is the eight hour epic story of a herd of unemployed donkeys trying to get their jobs back, all while navigating the perils of a post-Industrial society in which they’ve been made redundant. It has premiered in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Flemish, and Catalan at major festivals in the US, Canada, Argentina, Mexi...

Waiting for Leaning Tree (Studio Stage - The Royal Danish Opera, 2025, March 8th) © Mehmet Kerem Özel Leaning Tree is a dance piece produced by the Dansk Danseteater (Danish Dance Theatre) and the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra. It was choreographed by Fernando Melo and its music composed by Signe Lykke. The first performances of Leaning Tree , which took place at the start of the 2023-2024 season in the main hall of the Royal Danish Theatre, were presented to the audience with live music performed by eight groups of musicians placed in different areas of the auditorium as well as in the orchestra pit, creating a feeling of immersiveness. In the 2024-2025 season, Leaning Tree was once again included in the programme of  Dansk Danseteater, this time performed with recorded music at the Danish Royal Opera's small hall, Studio Stage, as well as in various cities across Denmark, and at the Kuopio Dance Festival in Finland. Comprising 13 dancers from around the world and led...

Arsenale, Venice © Mehmet Kerem Özel La Biennale di Venezia has been organising the Biennale Danza as part of its music and theatre festivals since 1934, and for the past 19 years Biennale Danza has run under its own title. Although it takes place annually, it uses the term biennale (biennial - every two years) in its title in reference to the organising institution.  This year the Biennale Danza took place between 17th July and 2nd August 2025 and it’s the theme chosen by Wayne McGregor, the British choreographer who has been the its artistic director for the past four years, was Making Myth. This year's awards were announced in January and presented to the winners at its opening: Twyla Tharp received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and Carolina Bianchi received the Silver Lion.  This year the Biennale Danza featured 18 productions, including nine world premieres and two European premieres, with the festival co-producing 11 of them. During the last four days...