The NEW BALTIC DANCE festival, taking place in Vilnius from 23 April to 18 May 2025, presents a programme that festival director Gintarė Masteikaitė describes as the strongest in her nine-year tenure. She invites audiences to experience the result of years spent carefully curating works of the highest calibre. This year’s programme will spark numerous discussions, with numerous events planned featuring creators, psychologists, and subject experts.
“In these unstable times, when everything around us is changing faster than we can comprehend, the body remains the only tangible way of experiencing the world. Our festival’s visual axis and core message celebrate the beauty and universality of body language, which serves as a bridge between reality, other people, and ourselves,” says the festival director.
The International Contemporary Dance Festival NEW BALTIC DANCE brings together artists, choreographers, dancers and audiences for the 29th time, exploring our contemporary world through the communicative power of dance. The festival will showcase works by choreographers from Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Iceland, Belarus, Sweden and Lithuania – all luminaries in today’s contemporary dance firmament.
The opening and closing troupes will grace the main stage of the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, whilst other productions will fill the spaces of Smoke Factory, National Gallery of Art and Printing House. With some of the performances, the festival will extend geographically to reach Druskininkai, Ukmergė and Gargždai.
Our festival kicks off with ‘Mont Ventoux’ by Italian-Spanish company Kor’sia, a dance piece inspired by a historical letter about an ascent of a mountain that symbolises an inward journey of self-discovery as well as an intimate encounter with nature. Its creators believe dance is the ideal medium for focussing attention on humans, their connection with the world, and inner transformation. This performance comes highly recommended for all those who miss the grandeur of dance, movement, scenography, and sound aesthetics.
One of the festival programme’s most sensitive and most progressive works, ‘Harmonia’ by Hungarian creator Adrienn Hód and German dance company Unusual Symptoms, invites audiences into an intimate experience dominated by the longing for intimacy and the sacredness of diverse dancing bodies. This work, dedicated to humanity, features dancers with disabilities whose presence brings authenticity and sensitivity, offering a vision of a more hopeful world.
One of the most anticipated solo premieres, ‘When the Bleeding Stops’ by Icelandic choreographer and performer Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir, explores women’s experiences during menopause. Regardless of the country or audience age, this work, which unites women worldwide, has consistently received standing ovations, smiles, laughter, and tears.
The festival culminates with German choreographer Moritz Ostruschnjak’s poignant piece ‘Non+Ultras’. Applying the logic of ubiquitous social networks, the choreographer examines connections between fan culture and forms of political protest. Here, swifties collide with football ultras, politics meets protest, overturned police cars, Bengalos and fluffy mascots, accompanied by Arabic chants and English stadium anthems, the Mickey Mouse Club and Beethoven. This whirlwind of layered meanings casts a spotlight on a society that surrenders to the power of images and is irreconcilably polarized.