Some magical hope opened the first clearing of the festival. In Jefta van Dinther ‘s “Unearth,” song, breath and movement fused into a shared suspension, a collective exhale that recalibrated the senses. Van Dinther’s performers entered a state of heightened perception, their voices folding into the choreography until vibration became the primary mode of relation. A lineage of trance, ritual and collective sensing translated into a contemporary architecture of movement and sound, offering its audience a space for attunement.

In Tjimur Dance Theatre ‘s “Living Cultural Body,” everyday gestures from Taiwan’s Indigenous communities are carried with clarity and the assurance of people who know that culture persists through repetition, through the ordinary, through the body’s capacity to remember. Healing here is continuity: a form of survival that doesn’t require spectacle.

Chiara Bersani seems to keep growing forests, this time slow, almost shy. In “Michel – The Animals I Am,” the delicate yet strong creatures that surfaced suggested that becoming is a fragile process, one that requires time and protection: a lineage of creatures who insist on gentleness as a political stance.

In “Clap & Slap,” the duo Agniete Lisičkinaitė and Igor Shugaleev navigated the distance between two bodies through clapping and slapping, gestures stretched by the pressure of war and the vulnerability of political exposure. Collaboration here was volatile, shaped by geopolitical tension and the need to remain visible. 

Nora chipaumire’s “Dambudzo” expanded the festival’s emotional terrain. Drawing on the life and writing of Dambudzo Marechera, the work built a choreographic space where colonial wounds became matter rather than metaphor: audience members were invited to move, witness and inhabit the work’s gravitational pull. A genealogy of resistance, also found in Fábio (Krayze) Januário’s “Musseque” as well: on stage, with the audience sitting all around, the history of kuduro, a dance born in the midst of Angola’s civil war. Januário foregrounded kuduro’s vitality, its capacity to generate joy in the face of devastation, and collective energy as a political resource.