CaDance Festival is The Hague’s leading celebration of contemporary dance and movement. From 16th – 25th May the city becomes a vibrant stage for bold, genre-blending performances, transforming spaces like Korzo, Amare, and even skate-parks into dynamic dance arenas. Featuring renowned creators like Astrid Boons, NDT1, and Zino Schat, the festival showcases 22 diverse performances spanning dance, circus, physical theatre, and film. With themes ranging from Hypnotic to Reflective to Energetic, CaDance offers a multi-sensory journey through the language of movement. Migle Duncikaite reports . . .
TENDER RESISTANCE 18th May
Faizah Grootens’ Tender Resistance is a potent exploration of vulnerability and strength through movement. Two dancers engage in a riveting dialogue of bodies—aggressive, yet tender; forceful, yet yielding. Initially, they resist and push against one another, expressing conflict through sharp, charged gestures. But as the performance unfolds, their movements shift—from confrontation to acceptance, from isolation to synchrony.
There’s a palpable sense of observation and mutual recognition before the dancers begin to move in harmony. Grootens’ choreography masterfully captures the tension between holding your ground and softening toward another. The dancers’ physicality is both powerful and sensitive, embodying the paradox of tender resistance. Circular, flowing motions emerge between abrupt staccatos, creating a rhythm that feels deeply rooted in both temperament and introspection.
The influence of Viola Davis’ emotional honesty and the lyrical cadence of Papiamentu can be felt throughout, infusing the performance with a subtle yet fierce emotional resonance. The bodies don’t just move—they speak, negotiate, and ultimately find common ground.
Tender Resistance is a striking statement on coexistence in a polarized world—where tenderness is not weakness, but a radical, resilient force.
HOW WE MOVE THROUGH THE DARK 18th May
How we move through the dark is a delicate and poetic excavation of the spaces between solitude and connection, guided by the expressive physicality of the Poetic Disasters Club and the intuitive choreographic hand of Lea Ved. The performance unfolds like a living poem—bodies move with a soft vulnerability, tracing invisible lines between earth and flesh, memory and presence.
Set within an immersive soundscape, the dancers evoke shadowy terrains where every gesture feels like both a question and an answer. Ved’s choreography balances rawness with precision, allowing the performers to drift between instinct and form. The sensation of being lost and found—of collapsing and catching—threads through the piece like a whispered promise.
What sets this work apart is its refusal to define the unknown; instead, it embraces mystery. The dancers seem to breathe in rhythm with the dark, guided not by light but by the quiet force of interbeing. Earth and body blur, and in this boundarylessness, something transcendent emerges.
How we move through the dark is a haunting, honest meditation on the human need for touch, for anchoring, and for the unseen forces that guide us when everything else fades to black.
SENESCENCE 17th May
In Senescence, Camiel Corneille delivers a poignant exploration of aging through a hypnotic dialogue between body and machine. The performance captures a visceral tension between the organic and the mechanical, where Corneille’s finely tuned physicality wrestles with a kinetic installation that feels both alien and familiar.
There is a striking sense of balance throughout—between power and surrender, control and collapse. Corneille’s interaction with the machine becomes a metaphor for the body’s negotiation with time. Every movement feels deliberate, as if testing the edges of his own resilience, while the installation reacts like an external force of nature: indifferent, unrelenting.
The strength of the piece lies in its quiet observation. Rather than dramatize decline, Senescence allows us to feel it—slowly, intimately. Camiel’s nuanced performance reveals the vulnerability of the aging artist, and yet, it never strays into despair. It is a study in persistence, in the effort to maintain connection with a world that keeps moving.
Profound and starkly beautiful, Senescence invites us to see aging not as a fading, but as a powerful transformation. In the interplay between flesh and machine, we are reminded of what it truly means to be human.
SIVER LINING 16th May
Silver Lining by Constantin Trommlitz is a visceral, hauntingly intimate portrayal of the body in pain—and its resilience. The performance unfolds with raw physicality, drawing on breaking, krump, and contemporary dance to craft a powerful, non-verbal narrative of chronic pain and transformation. The four dancers—Lara Szymanski Canaro, Filippo Gualandris, Virginia Lewerissa, and Trommlitz himself—move with intense emotional clarity. Their strong, deliberate movements pulse with tension, strength, and vulnerability, allowing the audience to feel the atmosphere rather than simply observe it.
Moments of body-to-body communication evoke support and shared struggle, blurring the line between individual pain and collective endurance. The choreography doesn’t seek to resolve pain but rather inhabits it fully, using it as a motor for discovery. Hypnotic and abstract, Silver Lining offers no easy answers—only the profound truth that pain, when expressed physically, can connect us beyond words.
DEEP TIME 16th May
Five words: Philosophical, Self-reflection, Delaying, Detailed, Body Awareness
In Deep Time, Astrid Boons crafts a haunting, cerebral experience that lingers long after the final movement. The performance unfolds like a meditation on human evolution, identity, and adaptation in a world that feels increasingly unfamiliar. Boons’ choreography, performed with remarkable control and nuance by three dancers, evokes alien and animalistic forms—bodies shifting and contorting in response to imagined environments. The effect is unsettling, intimate, and deeply thought-provoking.
The dancers move with both strength and subtlety, embodying a physical language that echoes Boons’ philosophical questions: Is our ability to adapt infinite? What happens when the body becomes the last frontier of selfhood in a digitized world? These questions are not asked aloud, but are instead deeply felt—etched into every slow bend, every tense pause, every fluid metamorphosis on stage.
At times, the bodies appear almost otherworldly—part creature, part human—tracing a line through time that calls into question our place in the evolutionary narrative. The performance mirrors the fragility and resilience of existence, offering a soft yet powerful reflection on what it means to inhabit a body in transition. Deep Time is both a physical journey and a quiet philosophical reckoning—introspective, beautifully detailed, and profoundly human.
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