Writing on dance as a living art: its bodies, histories, institutions, and changing meanings.
Seven reviews from the 20th International Festival of Contemporary Dance, following Wayne McGregor’s final Biennale Danza edition through questions of memory, transmission, cultural identity, artistic legacy, materiality, technology, and the changing life of the dancing body.
Reporting from Venice across the festival, I followed performances, screenings, premieres and award recipients, from Frederick Wiseman’s films on dance institutions to Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Golden Lion and WINNDance’s closing world premiere.
Complete coverage · 7 articles
Adam Linder’s Drip Tekhne for Danish Dance Theatre imagines the dancing body in technological evolution, moving from primordial fluidity towards increasingly complex organic-machine hybrids.
Drip Tekhne by Adam Linder. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse, Ballet and Crazy Horse: three films and three institutions, seen through labour, discipline and the machinery behind performance.
Still from Ballet by Frederick Wiseman.
Molissa Fenley’s State of Darkness and Bardo, with Cassandra Trenary: creation, transmission and the passage of a work across generations.
Cassandra Trenary in State of Darkness. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
Bangarra Dance Theatre’s Terrain and the company’s Golden Lion: Country, cultural transmission and a landscape understood as living presence.
Bangarra Dance Theatre in Terrain. Photograph by Daniel Boud.
Soa Ratsifandrihana and Silver Lion recipient Mamela Nyamza explore memory, political and cultural identity, power and resistance.
Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna by Soa Ratsifandrihana. Photograph by Harilay Rabenjamina.
Andrea Salustri and Oli Mathiesen turn to objects, sensory perception and religious imagery in two newly commissioned works.
Invisible by Andrea Salustri. Photograph by Cosmin Cirstea.
The festival’s closing world premiere brings together dancers over forty in Death in Venice and John Neumeier’s Bridge of Sighs.
WINNDance Company in Death in Venice. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
Carlotta Grisi, Marie Taglioni, Lucile Grahn and Fanny Cerrito
in Pas de Quatre (1845). New York Public Library |
Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
A study of the nineteenth-century ballerina as artist, celebrity, and cultural invention, tracing how virtuosity, image-making, rivalry, and public fascination created the modern mythology of the dance star.
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Fjord Review
Smoke and Mirrors
Paris Opera Ballet · July 2026
Micaela Taylor, Mats Ek, and Crystal Pite brought together in a closing programme that reflects on dance’s future, past, and present.
Amandine Albisson and Pablo Legasa in “Solo for Two.” Photograph by Julien Benhamou | OnP
Fjord Review
Idols and Dreams
Paris Opera Ballet · June 2026
Nureyev’s monumental production revisited through questions of orientalism, inheritance, and the fading proximity of choreographic memory.
Paul Marque and Sae Eun Park. Photograph by Yonathan Kellerman | OnP
Fjord Review
Pretty Woman
Paris Opera Ballet · May 2026
A close reading of John Neumeier’s literary ballet, its intricate dramaturgy, and the fragile social architecture surrounding Marguerite and Armand.
Amandine Albisson and Hugo Marchand. Photograph by Maria Helena Buckley | OnP
Fjord Review
New Frontiers
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées · April 2026
Crystal Pite, Medhi Walerski, and Johan Inger considered through passage, thresholds, and the singular vitality of Ballet BC’s dancers.
Artists of Ballet BC in “Passing.” Photograph by Luis Luque
Fjord Review
Romeo Revealed
Paris Opera Ballet · April 2026
An account of Nureyev’s dramatic intelligence and the tension between formal precision and overwhelming emotion in his Verona.
Paul Marque and Sae Eun Park. Photograph by Julien Benhamou | OnP
Fjord Review
Sculptural Lines
Louvre Museum, Paris · April 2026
Dance, sculpture, architecture, and nocturnal Paris meet beneath the Louvre Pyramid in an evening of luminous displacements.
Léonore Baulac and Hugo Marchand in “Trois Gnossiennes.” Photograph courtesy OnP
Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, Grimaldi Forum · Bachtrack
Paris Opera Ballet School · Fjord Review
Paris Opera Ballet · Fjord Review
Béjart Ballet Lausanne, La Seine Musicale · Fjord Review
Czech National Ballet · Bachtrack
Palais des Congrès, Paris · Fjord Review
Paris Opera Ballet · Fjord Review
Théâtre des Sablons, Neuilly-sur-Seine · Fjord Review
Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, Cannes · Bachtrack
La Seine Musicale, Paris · Fjord Review
Paris Opera Ballet · Fjord Review
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées · Fjord Review
Opera Ballet Vlaanderen · Bachtrack