Impressions from the Steps!

new foyer of the kurtheater, baden

Steps! the contemporary dance festival, a MIGROS-Kulturprozent project in which around 40 theatre institutions from across Switzerland collaborated by opening their venues, celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. Taking place from 5–29 March 2026, the festival featured 10 dance companies, invited by general artistic director Valeria Felder from Switzerland and abroad, who presented 11 different programmes to the audience. These companies represented a wide range of dance forms, not only contemporary dance but also examples of choreography flirting with new circus disciplines and acrobatics. 

The festival wasn't just about performances; there were also additional events such as workshops for amateurs and professionals, a hip-hop all-style dance battle, and workshops and performances designed specifically for primary and secondary school students. After each performance, there were also half-hour talks planned in the foyers with dancers, choreographers and the general artistic directors of the companies. One interesting event that I attended was the "Bewegte Einführung", held before the performance on the evening of 19 March. In the completely transparent foyer of the theatre building, overlooking the city park — almost like an ideal yoga or dance studio in its simplicity — two dancers from GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, Frida Dam Seidel and Ursula Urgeles, led a 30-minute dance session with a group of 15–20 people an hour before the performance began. This increased our awareness of the space, our bodies and each other. Rather than listening to a verbal presentation about what we were about to see, it was liberating to connect directly with the dance before a dance performance. It was a real pleasure, especially as we were guided by the artists themselves, whose extraordinary dancing we were about to witness on stage just half an hour later.

From 19 to 21 March 2026, I had the opportunity to attend performances in Baden and St. Gallen as part of the festival. In Baden, a charming spa town located 20 minutes by train from Zurich, I watched the GöteborgsOperans Danskompani (Gothenburg Opera Dance Company) from Sweden perform "Double Bill" at the Kurtheater, an example of modernist architecture dating back to 1952. In St Gallen, a city in northern Switzerland famous for its Baroque library, I saw "Play Dead" by the People Watching company from Canada at Lokremise, a former locomotive garage.

Spirit Willing

Tiffany Tregarthen and David Raymond, founders of the Out Innerspace, have been based in Vancouver for twenty years and have also served as creative dancers in Crystal Pite’s dance company Kidd Pivot for the past decade. In addition to their own company, they collaborate with Ballet BC (Canada), Netherlands Dance Theatre 2 (Netherlands), Hessisches Staatsballett (Germany), Gibney Dance (New York), and Opera Ballet Vlaanderen (Belgium). While their new piece with the latter will premiere in June 2026, Their first collaboration with GöteborgsOperans Danskompani was in 2025, when they premiered their piece Spirit Willing in Gothenburg last October. 

“Spirit Willing” was the first piece in GöteborgsOperans Danskompani’s double bill at the Steps! festival. Featuring a large cast of 17 dancers and lasting approximately 30 minutes, the piece is explores the hesitation a person experiences when taking action, where inner resistance from one's psychic or physical self holds them back, preventing movement, while the other aspect drives them to act. It depicts the state of being trapped between these two states, between action and inaction; the urge to overcome this intermediate state with determination and move forward; and the potential for this change to be multiplied through small, gradually growing gestures and movements, starting with a single individual and influencing those around them...

Tregarthen and Raymond's choreography was entirely based on this central idea and the questions and situations that arose from it. What was truly exciting was that, by approaching the choreography in this way, the duo achieved highly creative and innovative movement forms that were consequently impressive. What impressed me even more was being able to comprehend the starting idea of the piece without reading the brochure or consulting any other sources, and to 'read' it solely from the choreography. While some parts of the dancers' bodies, such as their torsos, moved forward, other limbs tried to move in the opposite direction. The excessive bending and raising of one limb caused other parts of the body, such as the head, to sway. The constant disruption and restoration of balance between these dual tensions, with different limbs constantly shifting, was also one of the most clearly readable aspects of the choreography. 

Another praiseworthy aspect of "Spirit Willing" besides its choreography was its lighting. James Proudfoot's lighting design served the main idea of Tregarthen and Raymond by compressing and relaxing the space for the dancers, mostly using top-down lighting in either point areas or linear paths.

ima

The second piece in GöteborgsOperans Danskompani's double bill was "ima" by Sharon Eyal, a former Batsheva dancer and artistic director. Following years of great interest in and demand for her work with her own company and numerous others worldwide, 'ima' is the fourth show that Eyal has designed for GöteborgsOperans Danskompani. The company is Eyal's most frequent collaborator after NDT, for whom she has staged six works. The dancers of GöteborgsOperans Danskompani are therefore not only familiar with Eyal's unique choreographic language, but also accustomed to it. The confidence gained from years of mutual acquaintance was evident in both the boldness of the choreography and the dancers' performance.

Eyal is one of the few choreographers whose work, dominated by powerful physicality, challenges the familiar movement repertoire and the forms of bodily expression in the contemporary dance scene. In this respect, not only her movement language but also her aesthetic language is instantly recognisable. So, if you ask what makes Eyal's work so distinctive, preventing you from confusing it with anyone else's, my personal answer — to quote directly from one of my previous writings — would be: 'In Eyal's work, the focus is entirely on the dancers' bodies. The movement possibilities of each muscle are explored and exhausted to the fullest extent. In particular, the almost constant movement on the toes throughout the piece instils tremendous energy and tension in both the dancing and viewing bodies. Formally, the group choreography generally creates a homogeneous overall impression, consisting of minimal movements. This serves as a backdrop for individuals or small groups who stand out with their solo, duo or trio dances. Eyal's pieces does not contain obvious narratives; rather, they reveal moods and emotions that address the fundamental conditions of human existence.” ( https://www.unlimitedrag.com/post/bir-akşam-iki-dünya-prömiyeri )

The 40-minute piece, "ima", performed by 15 dancers, was precisely such a piece in terms of its choreography, form, structure and the emotions it evoked in the audience. While watching it, I didn't find the fact that its name means 'mother' in Hebrew particularly significant, especially since a male dancer's solo dominated the first part, even though three female dancers would later take centre stage in the solo, duo, and trio sections. Miguel Duarte's unique performance in this role was notable, and Frida Dam Seidel stood out among the three female solo dancers with her emotion, presence and dedication. 

During the Q&A session, after learning from Katrin Hall, the company's general artistic director, that Eyal had lost her mother during the rehearsal process for this very piece, I reflected on it and realized that the presence and absence of the mother figure in a person's life is not conveyed in it through obvious, tangible situations or intellect, but rather through intense and delicate sensuality, and through an atmosphere that draws the audience in, almost hypnotizing them. 

I also believe that the pulsating electronic music by the French composer Josef Laimon, used by Eyal this time instead of her long-time collaborator and composer Gai Behar, provides not only rhythm, but also imbues the piece with emotion through its minimal melodies, thus strengthening its sensory atmosphere.

Play Dead

lokremise, st.gallen

People Watching is a Montreal-based collective founded by Ruben Ingwersen, Jérémi Levesque, Natasha Patterson, Brin Schoellkopf, Jarrod Takle and Sabine Van Rensburg during the lockdown caused by the 2020 pandemic. These six contemporary circus artists are all proven talents who have previously worked with companies such as The 7 Fingers, Circa, Cirque du Soleil and Cirque Éloize, as well as on Broadway. With their new company, they aim to reinterpret contemporary circus art and develop their own distinctive style. So, instead of the usual circus routines that showcase grandeur and talent, they set out to create pieces that combine circus with two other disciplines: contemporary dance and physical theatre. Their first show of 2023, "Play Dead", is currently touring the world and is precisely this kind of piece: Rather than containing a series of talent performances, it integrates the three disciplines, albeit sparsely and lightly stitched together.

In terms of content, "Play Dead" is a narrative composed of interwoven, humorous short stories that reveal the surreal and absurd situations hidden within everyday, mundane relationships and encounters among people in a home environment. Rather than being linear, this narrative presents a mosaic in which familiar and unsettling, grotesque and sensitive moments are transformed into powerful and poetic imagery through fluid stage language. Some of the figures and situations that interact with each other and the objects in a living room are as follows: A slender, light woman wrestling with a heavy, sturdy wardrobe that seems to have a connection to another world; two men tirelessly dancing and sliding on a table whose legs break and transform into a sloping platform; a woman hanging from a curtain by her arms; a man chasing spinning plates on chopsticks to prevent them from falling; and a man walking on a line of champagne bottles. There are also the repeated failed attempts of a man to light his cigarette and the weary face of a woman, who appears to be listening, but whose body language shows that she is trying to distance herself from the man. The idea of making the movements, relationships and encounters in the parts of the stage illuminated by a spotlight swinging through a pitch-black scene visible to the audience was brilliant. During this scene, the spotlight was suddenly released from its string and passed around like a game of dodgeball among the figures on stage, making whichever area it shone on visible to the audience.

True to its name, “Play Dead” evokes in the audience a feeling of constantly oscillating between play and death, joy and sorrow, happiness and sadness, lightness and transience. Yet it always remains balanced, suspended in those moments between dualities. I eagerly await the collective’s second piece, due to premiere at the end of this year.

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All photographs and videos in the article belong to Mehmet Kerem Özel. 

The original version of this article in Turkish was published in Kineo Dergi.