A living Festival – Bolzano Danza 2025: the vision of the Artistic Directors

We believe in a living festival.

A festival that engages the body, awakens thought, and questions our way of being in the world.

We believe in a form of intelligence that passes through sensations and emotions. It is not the art of reasoning, but that of jolts.

The one that awakens in us something older than speech: instinct, the sacred, the impulse.

It holds up a mirror to our times, capturing its fractures, its vertigo. It tells, in hollow, who we are.

And perhaps, if it dares, glimpses what we could become.

And that is where its political power begins.

As announced upon our appointment, we have chosen a three-year artistic project: The Trilogy of Passion.

A journey of the soul that will begin in 2025 with Insurrection – an invitation to question one’s own rebellion, to deconstruct oneself, to re-wild oneself.

2026 will be the year of The Horizon, marked by doubt and clairvoyance.

Finally, 2027 will herald Reconciliation, as if we must re-tame our humanity to better embrace that of the world.

To be a great international dance festival means to build bridges—bridges between territories, cultures, writings; between the intimate and the collective, between knowledge and the popular, between the here and the elsewhere.

Being a major international dance festival means creating bridges. Bridges between territories, cultures, artistic languages – between the intimate and the collective, between scholarly and popular, between here and elsewhere.

Internationalism always begins in the richness of a regional scene, in the momentum of local artists.
For us, international doesn’t mean distant escape – it’s a resonance chamber.

It means making the voices of the world echo on our local stages and allowing our local voices to carry far.
To be international is to welcome, weave, connect. It is to accept being crossed and transformed.

But these bridges are in motion. They require the courage to embrace imbalance, to remain in motion, to open up to the world – to the point of being changed by it.

In the end, isn’t dance precisely this? A force of balance born from imbalance. A movement toward others, toward oneself, toward tomorrow.

Dancing is writing. And writing is thinking.

The knowledge of the body is not singular, especially when it arises from such distinct fields as art and science.

This is why we have chosen to associate Bolzano Danza with the two major research hubs in the region: EURAC Research and NOI Techpark, for two projects that go beyond the linear temporality of a festival, by creating long-term laboratories of reflection and creation.
Labs conducted jointly by artists and researchers.

One Biennial Project (2026–2027): Border Lab, in collaboration with EURAC Research. A two-year laboratory investigating the body as a frontier: Two choreographic artists and two EURAC researchers will work together in a shared lab, to generate a hybrid, critical, and engaged reflection on the body. The body as the first territory of migration, as an ecological interface, as a living archive or as raw material.

And then the Triennial Project (2025–2027): Landi’sCube – The Encoded Body, with NOI Techpark. A laboratory led by artist Margherita Landis, in collaboration with two researchers from NOI Tech. At the heart of the project: virtual reality.

A field of exploration that is both theoretical – on new perceptions of the body and space, – therapeutic, with research on dance accessibility for the hearing impaired -, and artistic – with the popularization of choreographic notation systems.

A project where technology, art, and care converge.

These two laboratories position Bolzano Danza as a center of thought and research around the body. A performance must leave traces, archives to be consulted, contested, or perhaps celebrated.

I would like to express my deep gratitude to everyone who makes this adventure possible.

More than 160 artists and choreographers have responded to our call, bringing visions, momentum, and powerful gestures.

Around them, nearly 70 technicians and backstage professionals — stagehands, managers, technical crews — will work every day with rigor and passion.

Alongside them, a dedicated team of 30 collaborators from the Haydn Foundation and the Bolzano Danza Festival carry this project with remarkable commitment.

And finally, heartfelt thanks to our 30 institutional and technical partners, without whom none of this could be built.

To all of you: thank you for your trust, your energy, and your shared commitment.

A spirit that dances in a body that dances for a community that dances..

Be Bold.

Be Bolzano Danza.

Anouk Aspisi & Olivier Dubois