MOVING FUTURES DANCE FESTIVAL at the Korzo Theatre in The Hague and on tour

For the first time the Korzo plays host to the well-established Moving Futures Dance Festival tour which this year visits eleven towns and cities throughout the country.

Over the past five years five Dutch production houses and ateliers have brought together the works of a new generation of creatives from the field of dance and performance. The rich and varied programme of performances, installations, films and parties is a very intimate affair with small audiences intrinsically involved in proceedings.

This was demonstrated straight off with Judith Clijsters’ Bored to Death, which examined current obsessions with fitness and health culture. A circle of forty-odd chairs surrounded the performer as she frantically gyrated like a hula-hooper without a hoop to a soundscape of woman’s voice extolling the virtues of keeping fit. The dancer gradually moved towards her audience, slowly becoming more physical, touching like a callisthenic lap dancer.

The audience was slowly, one by one, drawn into the performance as they were selected and enticed into the centre of the circle, finally passing Ms Clijsters around, above their heads like a rag doll.

The festival really is a mixed bag with something for everyone. There is a drop-in film show projecting a loop of seven short, dance related videos and DanceTalk where the audience can interact face to face with those involved with the Festival.

Also on the first night of this two-night event was Emotional Porn – Exhibition of the Self which explored our obsessive behaviour of constant online exposure through modern technology. The evening concluded in the small Korzo Studio with Lois Alexander’s work in progress, Fading Fire.

The second evening asks the question what do neuroscientists, dance, Tibetan monks, and artificial intelligence have in common? In a new research project by the Groningen collective Random Collision and the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen they attempt to discover how mental connections are made. Point of departure is a debate where two or more monks try to discover inconsistencies in each other’s arguments while performing a sequence of movements. It appears that they are able to synchronize their brains during the debate. Panflutes and Paperwork is a playful exploration between choreographer Ingrid Berger Myhre and composer/musician Lasse Passage Nøsted. The duet playfully considers problems of the conventional relationship between dance and music.

If you like a melange of events and to be intimately involved, then Moving Futures is the place to be.   Michael Hasted   3rd May 2019

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