Announcing the 19th International DANCE Festival Munich
11 days, 19 productions, 45 performances, 12 venues: The 19th edition of the International DANCE Festival Munich has set its sights on artistic intensity as well as a significantly expanded presence throughout the city. With the support of the City of Munich, the new artistic director Tobias Staab has succeeded in bringing institutions and venues on board that have never before been involved in DANCE, including the Volkstheater, the Haus der Kunst, LENBACHHAUS / KUNSTBAU and the former riding hall UTOPIA.
Staab sees this as extraordinarily positive and encouraging evidence of the current upsurge in solidarity between the cultural institutions and urban society in Munich. “In order to put together a programme for DANCE 2025, I first asked myself very fundamental questions: What is contemporary dance? What is contemporary? And what makes dance genuinely interesting as a live art form? The answers very quickly took on a socio-political dimension. For dance as an art form constantly creates community. Dance lives through the forces and connections that become tangible between bodies. In a society that is increasingly split into ideological bubbles, such connections hold a utopian promise. And it is precisely this, in the literal sense of the word, that moves artists more than anything else right now. It is not an easy mission. After all, the ability to endure the otherness of others is one of the greatest challenges of our time. But it is also our responsibility as a society. This is where DANCE comes in – as a festival that aims to bring very different people closer together.”
Venues that are not designed with the classic juxtaposition of stage and auditorium are particularly suitable for such encounters. The programme features a number of performative productions at the interface of dance and the visual arts. The opening of the International DANCE Festival Munich will take place in a museum for the first time – in the Haus der Kunst with US artist Ligia Lewis. She will not only be represented with a performance on the opening evening, but also throughout the entire festival period with the performative installation study now steady, which has so far only been shown in New York.
The unorthodox performance situations lead naturally to other formats and styles. It is very important to Staab and the DANCE team to make communities and subcultures like the ballroom scene or urban dance forms such as breakdance visible and to open up their enormous potential to a larger audience. Although these subcultures and niches have existed in Munich for some time, there has been little exchange with contemporary dance to date. The festival aims to create a new, joint platform.
At the same time, Staab is determined to build on the long success story of DANCE. After all, the festival has always been known to bring both the crème de la crème and exciting discoveries of international dance to Munich. Some of the companies on the 2025 programme have never appeared in the city before, such as Marcos Morau and La Veronal, François Chaignaud and the French collective (LA)HORDE, who run the Ballet National de Marseille. Others are well established in Munich, but are now represented with pieces that show relatively unknown aspects of their work, e.g. Richard Siegal with a video installation and Marlene Monteiro Freitas, who has collaborated with the inclusive company Dançando com a Diferença.
Moreover, some true classics are part of the DANCE line-up, notably Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich from 1982 and Trajal Harral’s Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure) from 2012. The specific presentation of Munich artists will also continue – this time shining a spotlight on Moritz Ostruschnjak and Diego Tortelli & Miria Wurm. With the DANCE X AKADEMIE, there will also be a collaboration between DANCE and students from the Academy of Fine Arts. Students from the classes Alexandra Pirici (performance) and Julian Rosefeldt (media art) will realise performative works in LENBACHHAUS / KUNSTBAU and in the Haus der Kunst.
The 19th edition of the International DANCE Festival Munich runs May 22 to June 1, 2025. For more information and tickets, visit dance-muenchen.de
Image credit International DANCE Festival Munich