YouTube and dancing bears: Get ready for the best in European dance at Aerowaves Sofia

The Aerowaves: Spring Forward festival showcases the very best of Europe’s cutting-edge choreographers, bringing together top up-and-coming talent for a celebration of contemporary dance. This year, the action’s taking place in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia —and The Calvert Journal is already bringing you a sneak peek of some of the best the event has to offer.

Rita Góbi


Hungarian dancer and choreographer Rita Góbi explores the style and language of dance. Her performance, Volitant — Micromovements Expanded builds layers of precise, nuanced movements to a soundtrack composed of Morse code dashes and dots, guiding the audience through a world of metamorphosis.

Mathis Kleinschnittger

Dressed in a shaggy fur coat, Mathis Kleinschnittger takes on the role of a dancing bear to explore the modern loss of liberty and repression of wildness. By evoking and exploring familiar images — such a child’s teddy bear — Kleinschnittger invites audiences to look differently at a world of assumptions and familiarities. Expect plenty of growling.

Forecasting

Croatian Barbara Matijević and Italian Giuseppe Chico are the driving force behind FORECASTING: a dance performance based on video-sharing website YouTube. Performers move a laptop until the online videos blend with the human form in real time, creating a hybrid experience that blurs real life and digital narratives.

Tangaj Dance Collective

COUNTERBODY draws inspiration from physics and philosophy, reimagining dancers as particles in perpetual movement. Choreographed by Romania’s Simona Deaconescu and performed by her Tangaj Dance Collective, the installation places performances in a state of fluid reality.

Ingrid Berger Myhre

Norwegian dancer Ingrid Berger Myhre is best known for her simple, unpretentious choreography. Working with text and gesture, her performance Blanks invites the audience to deconstruct layers of signs and symbols, leaving the audience to fill in the gaps.

Aerowaves: Spring Forward takes place in Sofia from 23 — 25 March. For more information, visit the festival’s website here.