Where Emergence Meets Urgency

The 2026 edition of the festival SpringForward unfolded in Guimarães, Portugal, the European Green Capital of the year, a city whose commitment to sustainability offered a fitting backdrop for a festival dedicated to emerging choreographic futures. The Aerowaves network once again revealed its unmistakable sensibility: more than a showcase, Spring Forward felt like a study in attention to emergence and emergencies.

Performance

Aerowaves SpringForward Festival

Place

Guimarães, Portugal

Words

Greta Pieropan

Company Furinkaï and Théâtre de l’Entrouvert’s “Mizu.” Photograph by Francisco Guedes Rodrigues

Several works approached the body as a site of friction, where movement emerged from tension rather than release. Fábio (Krayze) Januário’s “Musseque” exploded with kuduro’s velocity, celebrating joy through dance as resistance, rhythm as refusal, speed as survival. Simona Dabija’s “BPM – Beats per Millennium” pushed tempo to the edge of exhaustion, anchoring it to a disco lost legacy; while Soraya Leila Emery’s “Turn On” fished from the stereotypes of orientalism and moved the audience through states of ignition and sweet softness.

Marie Kaae’s “Wired” treated the body like an electrical system, oscillating overload and activism, in a beautiful and rich musical and physical journey of pressure, rupture, recalibration, oppression, and reconnection. Mufutau Yusuf’s “Proses” deepened this cluster with a meditation on displacement as physical logic: his restraint sharpened the work’s emotional clarity, with every movement becoming a pressure point, felt in the joints, the breath, the pauses, until the final escape.

A second cluster of works focused on the labour of being with one another. In Charlie Morrissey and Markéta Stránská’s “Scáling,” acts of balance and collapse made instability feel like a natural condition of humanity. In Solène Wachter and Bryana Fritz's “Logbook,” the French duo approached collaboration as singing (and dancing) in polyphony, bringing an organised chaos into harmony. All these works, in their minimalism, sharpened perception until the smallest shift became meaningful, insisting on the intelligence of subtlety.

Chara Kotsali’s “It’s the End of the Amusement Phase.” Photograph by Francisco Guedes Rodrigues

Many artists worked from the edges of identity, exposing selfhood as something unstable, provisional, and in flux. Johana Malédon’s “Mâle” refused coherence in world-building, dancing a pas de deux with a LED screen in an intense work sustained by some powerful dancing. Nik Rajšek’s “Kink” explored desire as distortion, reshaping the same wavy movement again and again from different perspectives. Also Bast Hippocrate’s “Joyaux Lourdement Sous‑estimés” exposed undervalued gestures on a rotating platform, becoming violent or romantic depending on the perspective. Panos Malactos’s “No I’m Not” moved through pop gestures, while Forget‑me‑not’s Femme Physique from Iceland, invited a local choir to sing in a spa, and then enjoyed a liberating jump into the pool, putting exposure and body positivity under the spotlight. All while Francesca Santamaria’s “Good Vibes Only (beta test)” dissected Tiktok trends with surgical humour, revealing its quest for the “good vibes” as a choreography of denial.

Hybrid languages dominated another section of the programme, where dance collided with theatre, sound art, scenography and speculation. Paula Rosolen’s “Noice|Noise” built an ecosystem where bodies responded to sonic interference rather than counts; while Annabel Koele’s “Magnitude” used a guitar as a physical trigger: each strum, vibration or weight shift pushed the performer’s body toward new thresholds of virtuosity and limitation, becoming an external nervous system, with sound choreographing flesh. Fabla Collective’s “Do Birds Dream of Flying?” hovered between imagination and physics, asking what flight feels like from the inside. A gentle piece where the performers oscillated between groundedness and lift, creating a choreography that felt like a thought experiment made physical.

Inka Romaní’s “Volvamos al baile.” Photograph by Francisco Guedes Rodrigues

A final group approached choreography as a way of reading the world. Chara Kotsali’s “It’s the End of the Amusement Phase” is a feminist take on a dystopia that is awaiting the world: stretching even the littlest gesture into absurdity, her dance—supported by other two amazing performers—is slam poetry in motion, capturing the collapse of amusement with impeccable timing, revealing the social body in a state of overstimulation and fatigue. It’s inevitable to think about climate change whilst watching Company Furinkaï and Théâtre de l’Entrouvert’s “Mizu:” a visual poem where choreography is sculptural, and the wonderful Satchie Noro dances with a puppet made of ice, slowly melting into the river they’re both skating on.

Inka Romaní’s “Volvamos al baile” investigates dance as celebration, but also how dictatorial regimes use movement and the body as a tool for control and propaganda. With her powerful take on a traditional folk dance and her contemporary twists, Romaní reminded the audience that dancing together is one of the oldest forms of resistance.

In Guimarães, a city committed to ecological futures, Aerowaves offered choreographic futures just as urgently: unfinished, searching, courageous. Spring Forward remains one of the few European platforms where experimentation is expected, a place where artists can succeed and fail interestingly, shifting the conversation simply by crafting their own language.

Greta Pieropan

Greta Pieropan likes to define herself as ‘your friendly neighbourhood dramaturg’. She works as a dance dramaturg with artists, collectives, and communities to build thought, structure, and narrative within creative processes. She believes in dramaturgy as a relational practice—one that generates context, listening and accessibility. She’s also a professional shapeshifter: from dramaturgy in the rehearsal room, to project development, to moderating public conversations, to workshops, digital and traditional communication for live performance, she’s always backstage ready to support the dance scenes.

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