Springback 2020 Open Call is open!
Springback Academy at Spring Forward Festival
24 -26 April 2020 Rijeka, Croatia
Diverse or drab?
Anna Kozonina on Spring Forward 2019
The politics of smiling
Léa Poiré on Spring Forward 2019
Learning From Difference
Teresa Fazan on Spring Forward 2019
On engagement
Jordi Ribot i Thunnissen on Spring Forward 2019
It wouldn’t be the same without you
Suzanne Frost on Spring Forward 2019
Same difference: on life, death and monotony
Sanjoy Roy on Spring Forward 2019
Don’t tell me, show me (or how to communicate a compelling story)
Oonagh Duckworth on Spring Forward 2019
The best spectator
John Lyndon on Spring Forward 2019
Dancing with text
Beatrix Joyce on Spring Forward 2019
There is no such thing as a new idea
Emily May on Spring Forward 2019
Springback 2019 Open Call is open!
on Spring Forward 2018
Context is king
Lotte Wijers on Spring Forward 2018
Naked ambitions
David Pallant on Spring Forward 2018
How to Dislike Dance
Donald Hutera on Spring Forward 2018
The Gender Agenda
Kelly Apter on Spring Forward 2018
Snowed Under in Sofia
Oonagh Duckworth on Spring Forward 2018
What’s wrong with a solo?
Alexandra Gray on Spring Forward 2018
To tease or not to tease?
Claire Lefevre on Spring Forward 2018
Material matters
Sanjoy Roy on Spring Forward 2018
Springback Academy 2018: Dance Writers Wanted!
on Spring Forward 2017
In the process of becoming an ally
Annette van Zwoll on Spring Forward 2017
Embraced by the Invisible Hands of Dance
Nadja Bozovic on Spring Forward 2017
Тhe politics of dance at Spring Forward 17 - Beauty re-invented
Yasen Vasilev on Spring Forward 2017
Dance gave more of everything
Ana Vallejos Cotter on Spring Forward 2017
‘A Vision of the World’
Donald Hutera on Spring Forward 2017
Minority identities and the politics of turning one’s back
Daniel Pitt on Spring Forward 2017
“Dance is art, not information”
Anna Dohy on Spring Forward 2017
O Death, where is thy spring?
Sanjoy Roy on Spring Forward 2017
Caring for the Swan: A precarious moment for dancing
Sebastian Kann on Spring Forward 2017
The truths of performance
Róisín O’Brien on Spring Forward 2016
Dancing in Tumultuous Times
Oonagh Duckworth on Reflections on dance
Bambi-Eyed in Pilsen
Francesca Pinder
The Importance of Being Present
Stella Mastorosteriou on Reflections on dance
Do dancers write differently about performances than non-dancers?
Riikka Laakso on Reflections on dance
Do you see what I am talking about?
Anastasio Koukoutas on Reflections on dance
Who am I to say? Inner battles of a dancer turned critic for a weekend
Lucia Fernandez on Reflections on dance
Subject–verb: on solos and sentences
Sanjoy Roy on Reflections on dance
A View From Afar: Experiencing Contemporary Performance Online
on Reflections on dance
Recently, we asked dance writers around the world watching Spring Forward 16 online, to review performances of their choice. Lauren Warnecke from Chicago, USA watched and reviewed a couple of Spring Forward performances via our Live Stream. Below, she writes about her experience, and what is lost and found watching dance online.
You can read the live stream performance reviews here
Spring Forward Live Stream: The Online Reviews Are In!
on Spring Forward 2016
Not content with simply live streaming our festival online, we were interested to see how the viewers at home experienced a cyber contemporary performance. One open call later, and we had a team of budding dance writers from around the world watching the live stream and reviewing shows of their choice. Here’s how they got on…
The universal (English) language of dance
Jelena Mihelčić on Reflections on dance
Le Quotidien des Plateaux - a view from behind the camera
Marie Pons on Reflections on dance
I had the great pleasure of being part of the web-tv team at Les Plateaux, in CDC La Briqueterie from 23rd-26th September. 4 days, 17 companies and shows to capture, and 11 people behind cameras to do so. Here’s a sneak peek behind the scenes!
Words as footsteps
Niko Hallikainen on Spring Forward 2015
For me writing on dance has been a form of documentation. Each text is always an attempt to capture verbally something that has evaporated physically. The form’s requirement to be documented in writing is questioned by the visual access afforded by ArtStreamingTV's live broadcasts of some of this year’s festival pieces. It does so in such a way that, bewilderingly, many can have a personal, yet mediated, experience of a performance. In such a context this technical milestone questions my job as a writer.
(Ine)quality and dance criticism: but what about the dance?
Luke Forbes on Spring Forward 2015
The call for expressions of interest to take part in the Springback Academy promised mentorship in quality dance criticism. The texts we produced were subsequently posted on the Springback Academy website in an attempt to “stimulate conversations online that will enable Aerowaves to connect with digitally active dance enthusiasts across Europe–ensuring people who are not in Barcelona share ideas, thoughts and views.” However, in a round of introductions prior to the festival, and again during a panel discussion titled Critical Issues, seemingly conflicting efforts at Spring Forward to (i) encourage discussions about dance online, and (ii) simultaneously problematise dance criticism published/posted online, became apparent.
On the banks of the dance river
Gaia Clotilde Chernetich on Spring Forward 2015
We don’t need to be scientists to know that, mainly, the universe depends on movement. The smallest atoms, as well as the farthest planets, dance in space. And then there’s the realm of live bodies for whom movement in itself is a symptom of life.
Glimpses and thoughts upon a European Dance Mercat
Anna Chirescu on Spring Forward 2015
72 hours in Barcelona, 23 performances to watch and only 140 words with which to lay out your thoughts about each one on virtual paper; and this after a long day, when Barcelona starts to gorge its artery with late night drinkers.
Reviewing the review and the viewer
Louise Tanoto on Spring Forward 2015
By definition a spectator is ‘a person who is present at and views a spectacle’.
A viewer is ‘a person or thing that views’. The audience, spectators at a public event, collectively view. But a ‘reader’ can ‘look carefully so as to understand the meaning’, ‘apprehend or interpret the meaning’ and still has room to ‘make out the significance by scrutiny or observation’. If audiences were called 'readers' rather than viewers how different might that feel?
In tune: on dance, dramaturgy and being happy together
Marie Pons on Spring Forward 2015
Aerowaves raised a bunch (a tremendous bunch) of questions about performance, dance, audience reception and everything entangled in between. Gulping down 23 shows in one go – which neither our brain, nor our eyes nor our senses are prepared for – raised the questions: what’s making it work for me? What makes one performance stand out from others?
On the way: from stage to text
Clàudia Brufau on Spring Forward 2015
Dance on stage has many simultaneous layers. Besides, it is ephemeral: watching dance is chasing something that it is already not there.
In and outside the box
Donald Hutera on Spring Forward 2015
Things peculiarly clarifying (yet also potentially distorted) happen when you attempt to digest 23 largely 40-minute dance works in two and half days. You start to get a stronger sense of what you might want from live performance generally and, perhaps, dance in particular.
Watching dark matters (Aerowaves: titles and aftertastes)
Elina Cire on Spring Forward 2015
Late night diary of a dance festival junkie
Oonagh Duckworth on Spring Forward 2015
Watching 23 live dance shows over one weekend is not your everyday audience’s experience. I found it induced an addictive state of emotional and intellectual overdrive — you know you can’t really cope with another show but you just can’t bear to miss one either. Nor miss being part of the debate…
Dance across Europe: Critical issues on the geography of the body
Anastasio Koukoutas on Spring Forward 2015
In the last decade we have been witnessing the emergence of new choreographing practices in the performing arts. There has been a great shift in choreographic scores and it is becoming commonplace to consider dance a hybrid art exploring the many possibilities of physical articulation.
English first, English second
Sanjoy Roy on Spring Forward 2015
They say dance is a universal language, because movement is wordless. Okay, the image is neither exact nor exactly true; but there is truth in it.
The Long Dance
Hannah Tookey on Spring Forward 2014
A number of pieces in this year’s Spring Forward dance festival might have been mistaken as being the product of a group of A Level drama students who’d all been given the same brief for their exam. Now this is absolutely not to say that the quality of work wasn’t high or that there weren’t some exceptionally clever and entertaining performances, but that the general body of work at the festival reeked of a similar theme: long, slow, and drawn out.
In the way of making
Christel Molin on Spring Forward 2014
Every choreographer takes pride in his or her art, just as every producer takes pride in letting each artist’s piece be fully experienced onstage by them and those who are in the audience.
Umea: 2014 / Questions
Sally Marie on Spring Forward 2014
Delivering the unsaid
Chiara Organtini on Spring Forward 2014
Springback to make the best jump. Springback to sit in the first row, and be ready to get not on but into the stage. Take a breath, springback and dive in even in a state of apnea and against the ticking of time.
Many faces of contemporary dance on display in Umea
Petra Dotlačilová on Spring Forward 2014
Four days, seven theatrical spaces, twenty four shows. These are the most important numbers of the 4th Spring Forward Dance Festival which took place in the Swedish city of Umeå from 24th to 27th of April 2014.
Wellsprung
Morag Deyes on Spring Forward 2014
In the light and freshness of Umea we were indeed sprung forwards, diagonally and sideways but never backwards.
Art=Good
Jochen Stechmann on Spring Forward 2014
First impressions are often based on only superficial observations and might quickly lead to judgment – about a person as well as an artwork.
Tastemakers
Alice Robotham on Spring Forward 2014
Spring Forward proved to be a chocolate box of a festival, not everything was to my taste but overall, a stimulating gift. So who were the tastemakers?
Paint dries, kettles boil
Sanjoy Roy on Spring Forward 2014
Towards a new and franker criticism
Margareta Sörenson on Spring Forward 2014
Artistic quality is my focus as a critic. Easy to say, but then we all know all the other aspects which are involved; the practical, economic and geographic ones, educational elements and levels of development.
Where are the words?
Donald Hutera on Spring Forward 2014
Finding just the right words has usually been a key aim when writing about dance. Which ones best capture the essence of a performance as well as my experience of it?