Julidans is a renowned international modern dance festival that takes place in Amsterdam early in July each year. The festival, which is held in a variety of locations around the city, is committed to showcasing daring, cutting-edge and groundbreaking dance performances from around the world. In its latest edition, established masters and enfants terribles of modern dance gathered to tell their personal stories.

A passion for experimentation pervades Amsterdam’s representative international dance festival

Julidans presents a wide range of international contemporary dance performances. The annual festival, which takes place in Amsterdam during the first half of July, is organized by Stichting Julidans, a small foundation that cooperates closely with several different organizations in the city. The foundation draws upon the knowledge and facilities of various partners in Amsterdam, with the main ones being the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam, the municipal theatre, and producer Van Baasbank Baggerman. For the past 23 years, Julidans has given festivalgoers a glimpse of the state of dance in the world today, demonstrating the richness of the discipline by focusing on works with a strong social vision and a theatrical, multi-disciplinary approach. Julidans showcases a contrary kind of dance, which focuses not so much on aesthetics as on the power of theatrical expression. The festival’s main goal is to communicate with the audience—including professionals, laypeople, and dance lovers—on various levels and to give them access to international contemporary dance from a variety of styles as well as informative and cutting-edge programming.Over the years, the enthusiasm of both the audience and the theatres in the area has made it possible for the festival to expand, enabling Julidans to become an internationally recognized festival.

There are several dance festivals in Holland. The yearly Dutch Dance Days festival in Maastricht focuses on Dutch dance production and Dutch dance trophies.The Holland Dance Festival, situated in The Hague, is a biennale that mainly works with pieces by larger international academic dance companies and provides laypeople with dance education. Finally, there are also a few smaller-scale festivals like the Cadance from Korzotheater in The Hague, which promotes talented young Dutch dancers,and Something RAW in Frascati and Brakke Grond (Amsterdam), which concentrates on cutting-edge artists from abroad in the areas of performance and dance. Julidans and the Holland Dance Festival are the largest international festivals of them all. Of the two, Julidan stakes more risks in its program lineup. The international Springdance festival in Utrecht recently merged with the theatre-based Festival aan de Werf. Today, the two festivals continue their work as a combined international performing arts festival under the name of SPRING.

Julidans selects its program offerings from performances that feature at big European festivals including, among others, Montpellier Danse, Tanz im August, Impuls Tanz, Festival d’Avignon, British Dance Edition and Tanzmesse. The number of foreign performers visiting Julidans has risen sharply over the last few years, leading to productions that featured at Julidans also appearing in programs elsewhere. During the festival’s 23-year existence,great names such as Pina Bausch, Alain Platel, Jan Fabre, Lloyd Newson, Wim Vandekeybus, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Akram Khanall made an appearance, as well as new innovators of the hour—the so-called provocateurs—such as, recently, Dave St-Pierreand Olivier Dubois. Besides the main program, which features more or less well-known names, the “Julidans-Next” program presents young talented international choreographers often invited on the recommendation of the choreographers of the main program. In the past, this program introduced audiences to a wide range of choreographers from Asia, and specifically from China. As it expanded, the festival also began offering a cultural program for mixed age groups in parts of the city where art and culture are not out in the open and visits to the theatre are not taken for granted. The festival developed a fringe program in order to provide the public with extra information about the performances. For dance producers, it organizes artistic meetings for professional development and exchange.

Under the dominance of French dance, more pieces address social themes

Highlights of the recent program that was offered from July 2 to July 12, 2013 were Akram Kahn with iTMOi (Great Britain);Disabled Theatre by Theater HORA & Jérôme Bel (Switzerland);Tragédie by Olivier Dubois (France);Tao Dance with 4 & 5, Showroomdummies#3 and Object re-trouvés by Gisèle Vienne, Etienne Bideau-Rey & Mathilde Monnier, and Ballet Lorraine (France); and Sfumato from Rachid Ouramdane (France). Although there is no specific policy on nationality, the recent Julidans program had a strong focus on French productions.This shows that dance is alive and well in France today and that French companies and dance centers are opening their doors for a new generation of choreographers. This is not only the case in France, of course, and an increasing number of international ballet companies are searching for new means of expression. It is visible in the latest performance of the famous Swedish Cullberg Ballet, which gave carte blanche to young choreographer Jefta van Dinther, who studied in Holland. Plateau Effect is his first large-scale production. The same observation can be made for Alaska,another Swedish production, which is a collaboration between choreographer Gunilla Heilborn and the Göteborgs Operans Danskompani.

The image for the festival this year was a heart of clay with small needles stuck into it. This image referred to performances that are based on a concern for current social developments. These pieces address themes that confront painful realities and are all the more beautiful for it. An example of a particularly poetic piece was Sfumato by Rachid Ouramdane, a choreographer whose works have a political, philosophical slant. As enchanting as the misty images are in Sfumato, the underlying idea is very pointed: ecological disasters result from human action. Ouramdane’s colleague and countryman Jérôme Bel forced the audience to face a reality that is usually ignored or concealed. In Disabled Theatre, he more or less follows the Pina Bausch method,working with a group of mentally handicapped people.

In the latest festival, folklore also showed up in contemporary dance, for instance in the far-from-traditional African dance of Panaibra Gabriel Canda or the contemporary kathak of rising star Aakash Odedra. Alessandro Sciarroni tackled the age-old art of thigh slapping, lederhosen and all.

As masters and enfants terribles gathered at Julidans 2013 to tell their personal stories, it all came together in the grand finale of the festival. In iTMOi (In the Mind of Igor) Akram Khan delved into the world of composer Stravinsky, who scandalized the audience with his work Sacre du Printemps a century ago together with dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. This shows how the history of dance was also vividly presented at Julidans 2013.