Programme 2024

(DON’T) LOOK ME IN THE EYES

Ainhoa Hernández Escudero

A creation conceived as the second chapter of a trilogy, initiated with the graduation production of the artist at DAS Theatre in 2022. The mythological figure of Medusa, an important figure in the iconography of Western culture is filtered and examined through critical thinking, pop culture, and sci-fi aesthetics, in search of its resonance in today's world.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Ezra Veldhuis & Bosse Provoost

Machines, medicine, algorithms: many new technologies seem aimed at social control or the disciplining of labour, rather than giving us new forms of freedom. In All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Ezra Veldhuis and Bosse Provoost explore freedom and unfreedom in relation to technology, by staging Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem of the same name.

Blood Thirsty

Ira Melkonyan/the rubberbodies collective

In this work in progress, Melkonyan combines her experience as an artist and as a microbiologist to explore the connections and collisions between the biological and cultural contexts of blood. In her transdisciplinary performance, strange visions expand and leak out of the sterile vessels of a science lab, breaching the boundaries of what can be routinely contained.

Borderline Visible (collective experience)

Ant Hampton / Time Based Editions

A printed book and a sound space. The two elements are joined together in time and space and shared by a temporary audience community. Collectively we follow the story plotted from individual biographies and historical events, until we are confronted with the reality happening right next to us, but not always seen by us.

Breathe

Milla Koistinen

A poetic outdoor choreography for one human body and some oversized inflatable objects. In this work the Finnish choreographer and performer Milla Koistinen invites us to consider our relationship with nature and space, the human scale and the scale of the city. About emotions we generate and those being imposed on us.

collection of

Turkowski & Nowacka

What can a box of family photos from an Amsterdam home contain? An artistic investigation by a Polish duo that takes us into the rooms where the future of the global order was agreed upon, and to small remote villages on the other side of the world.

Hands Made

Begüm Erciyas

An exciting performative installation that reduces the spectrum of ways we interact with the world to just the touch of our fingertips. What do hands mean to us, and what can we communicate through our hands? About how our manual interface has changed and how it will change in the future.

Haribo Kimchi

Jaha Koo / CAMPO

Due to family circumstances, the performances of the production Haribo Kimchi by Jaha Koo, which was scheduled to premiere in Brussels in May and then be shown at SPRING, unfortunately have to be postponed to a later date. Therefore, all three performances at SPRING are unfortunately canceled.

Hmadcha

Taoufiq Izeddiou - company Anania

A new creation by one of the most important Moroccan choreographers of today. During the uncertain time of the pandemic, this Marrakesh-based artist gathered a group of dancers. Like in the old Sufi brotherhood tradition, they search for rhythms and melodies, to ecstatically dance out their anxiety and ritually re-emerge from the crisis.

Kono atari no dokoka (Somewhere around here)

Michikazu Matsune & Martine Pisani

Three artists meet on stage to revisit their early careers. Mapping how artistic creations and biographies interweave, they embark on a journey through time and space in search of the past and its meaning today. Touching and infused with subtle humour.

Lake Life

Kate McIntosh

McIntosh invites audiences from 10 to 100 years old into her artistic work, where the performance can happen only when activated by spectators. Lake Life is a game - and an invitation for a playful yet radical imagination. Can we walk away from our boundaries? Can we to think again out of the box, and transform the rules we follow into something serving better the purpose, for us, and the world around?

Lichtgang

Schweigman& & Johannes Bellinkx

Where does tangible reality end and where does the boundless realm of our imagination begin? Step inside Lichtgang; a mini-cinema where we play with visual perception. Is “reality” the things we see and perceive, or is it a construct of our own mind’s making? Lichtgang is a hallucinatory experience of 7 minutes, an abstract film that takes place largely inside your own eyes.

MOTHERS A SONG FOR WARTIME

Marta Górnicka

Marta Górnicka returns to SPRING! She is bringing a choir of 21 women of different ages, backgrounds and professions. In a powerful testimony of the realities of war, each of them tells her own story of how war has changed her life, while collectively they try to find a way to overcome the horror.

Musa Insistente

Leandro Souza

In this extended tourversion of his DAS Choreography graduation production, Souza, an Amsterdam based Brazilian choreographer, is taking choreography as an escape strategy from the flattening forces of life. The work is a game between speech and body: the repetition and entanglement of texts and gestures from culture, philosophy and dance open the mind.

my light is your light…

alaa minawi

“when people are forced to leave their cities, they do not only leave their homes, belongings, schools, favorite toys and friends and neighbors behind… they actually leave their skin and organs and memories. they transform into outlines of a radiating light. they walk, whispering one thing: my light is your light…"

RUSH

Mette Ingvartsen

A wild ride through choreographer Mette Ingvartsen’s works of the past twenty years, many of which have been presented at SPRING. With citations, comments, and unexpected pairings Manon Santkin offers us new insights into the creations, and searches for new connections and contexts. A subversive solo piece celebrating the collaboration.

Songs for a Passerby

Celine Daemen

With her award-winning latest work, Celine Daemen further develops her unique way of creating transdisciplinary installations in VR surroundings. As a puppeteer of your own body you will be entering a poetic space where the melancholy question arises: is this me passing by moments, or is it rather the moments passing by me?

Spelling Spectacle

Ingrid Berger Myhre

Choreographer Ingrid Berger Myhre comes back to SPRING. Spelling Spectacle is a game where three performers navigate a meticulously devised, yet playful, plan. Sparkling with intelligence and humour, they stage an attempt to look for pitfalls in logic. Should we look at what is in front of us, or see through?

SPRING into the blue

into the blue

Feel the pulse of experimental beats as top-tier freestyle dancers from across the country come together to fight for the champion’s title. Pushing the boundaries of movement and creativity, the dancers are not only battling each other, but primarily themselves. Who can remain in control and connected with the music with all those eyes on them?

Thanks for Being Here

Ontroerend Goed

'Thanks for Being Here' is an ode to the audience. A shared moment, full of different expectations, different points of view, different lives. A performance about watching and being watched. In a game of perspectives, Ontroerend Goed lets us experience the impossibility of a shared perspective. And we celebrate that multiverse of individual realities. Thanks for being here.

The Filipino Superwoman Band

Eisa Jocson

Eisa Jocson returns to SPRING to continue her consistent research into the exploitation of the citizens of the global south. The Filipino Superwoman Band is a pop-up girl band, teasing us with energetic music and ecstatic choreography, to uncover for us the realities of the global industry known as OFM (Overseas Filipino Musician).

The Indonesian Dialogues

There Will Be Film

A multidisciplinary performance featuring video installations, live painting and music. Post-colonial descendants from the Netherlands, Switzerland and Indonesia address questions around colonialism, cultural and personal biases: how does our history continue to influence our present? Who can actually speak about the past? Whose voice is being heard?

The Syncopators

Ingri Fiksdal, Fredrik Floen, Mariama Fatou Kalley Slåttøy

An unexpected dance intervention in the landscape of the city. A group of performers in search of a common rhythm, looking for ways to fit their bodies and the stories they carry into this landscape. An ecstatic celebration of public space – a space for performers and a space for audiences.

tReta, a performative invasion

Original Bomber Crew

A young dance collective from Teresina, Brazil, invites us to immerse ourselves in the reality of everyday life in a Brazilian city. Rooted in sounds and movement taken from urban culture, tReta is an artistic gesture to stand against oppression and daily struggle, and cherish the moment of being together.

Una Isla

Agrupación Señor Serrano

New creation by this Catalan collective that has received the Silver Lion for innovation in performing arts at the Venice Biennale. Since we’ve failed so many times to create a “better world”, let's ask Artificial Intelligence for help this time. Will the technology we created to improve our lives help us finally design an “utopian paradise”? Or will it decide that we ourselves are the obstacle preventing us from ever achieving it?

Unbearable Darkness

Choy Ka Fai

In this paranormal choreography experience, Choy Ka Fai combines the digital and artificial with the spiritual. The dancer’s living body, digital extended reality and shamanistic gestures will bring a spectral presence to the stage of one of the biggest figures of Butoh dance, right here in Utrecht!

Ways to listen to a river

Nahuel Cano

Nahuel Cano is an Argentinian artist based in the Netherlands. In this work he uses music, video and poetry to tell stories of three important rivers in his life: the Limay and the Salado in Argentina, and the Vecht in the Netherlands. Following these rivers he investigates how history and ecology, feelings, and intimate memories are part of the sound of a river: how rivers define us, and how we influence them.

Within Cells Interlinked

Andrea Božić and Julia Willms | TILT

Between our dreams, surveillance strategies and gameplay reality, the new performance by TILT takes us on a journey through different realities which can coexist in  one place and one time. Božić and Willms combine different media on stage and invite us to immerse in this phantasmagoria

Book Launch: What Can Theatre Do

This book launch will feature a conversation and an artistic intervention, focused around the utterance 'What Can Theatre Do': an invitation for artists and thinkers alike to reimagine the potential agency of the performing arts.

Long Table Talk: Speculative Storytelling

Andrea Božić and Julia Willms | TILT

Let’s tell the unknown.  

Long Table Talk: Staging Climate

Nahuel Cano, Bosse Provoost, Ezra Veldhuis

How to stage ‘the outside’ inside?

MASTERCLASS #1

Mette Ingvartsen

Masterclass with choreographer and dancer Mette Ingvartsen, whose work is characterized by hybridity and combines dance and movement with other domains.

MASTERCLASS #2

Taoufiq Izeddiou - company Anania

Masterclass with Taoufiq Izeddiou: choreographer, dancer, and educator. This workshop is based on his piece HMADCHA, which features a world where dance meets trance, bodily exhaustion, and the transformation of the individual into a political body.

MASTERCLASS #3

Ezra Veldhuis, Bosse Provoost, Extinction Rebellion Utrecht

Workshop for artists and activists in which Ezra Veldhuis, Bosse Provoost, and Extinction Rebellion invent an “installation protest" together with the participants.

MASTERCLASS #4

Ontroerend Goed, Karolien De Bleser, Leonore Spee

OFFSPRING : studio sharings #2

Lizzy Deacon and Ika Schwander, Ashley Ho & Domenik Naue

Experience brand new work! OFFSPRING shows making processes for audiences curious about new developments in the performing arts. 

OFFSPRING: studio sharings #1

Ghaliah Conroy, Aina Roca

Experience brand new work! OFFSPRING shows making processes for audiences curious about new developments in the performing arts. 

Performative presentation Someone Like Me by Festivalresident Nina Khyzhna

Nina Khyzhna

Ukrainian maker Nina Khyzhna is this year’s festival resident of SPRING. After the Topic Talk War on Stage, she will give a performative presentation of her latest work Someone Like Me.

PrikkelTalk

Boukje Schweigman

In this PrikkelTalk, Boukje Schweigman, artistic director of Schweigman&, delves deeper into the phenomenon of sensory processing, at both physiological and socio-cultural levels. 

Reading Group #1 with Ainhoa Hernández Escudero

Ainhoa Hernández Escudero

Come have a tea and read together with artists and audiences in the cosy atmosphere of bookstore Savannah Bay. You don't have to prepare anything!

Reading Group #2 with Turkowski & Nowacka

Turkowski & Nowacka

Come have a tea and read together with artists and audiences in the cosy atmosphere of bookstore Savannah Bay. You don't have to prepare anything! 

Reading Group #3 with Celine Daemen

Celine Daemen

Come have a tea and read together with artists and audiences in the cosy atmosphere of bookstore Savannah Bay. You don't have to prepare anything! 

Surprise Act: Closing Night

SPRING 2024 will close with a special surprise act in the context of Utrecht Pride. This act will be organized by dragkings from House of Løstbois, winner of Superball 2023.

Topic Talk: Ownership & (De)colonial Practices

Choy Ka Fai, Leandro Souza, Francesca Vincentie

How do we talk about the colonial past? And is the colonial perspective really about the past?  

Topic Talk: War on Stage

Ira Melkonyan, alaa minawi, Sruti Bala

Is there room for war on stage?

Workshop with Original Bomber Crew

Get Ready to Move! Join Us for the Original Bomber Crew Workshop on May 22nd!

A City Within a Building

A look at Mariupol Drama Theatre as something more than a target on the Russian military radar: instead, as an embodiment of the collective memory of the witnesses to the attack.