We Humans, the 18th International Festival of Contemporary Dance, which is part of the larger Venice Biennale, starts today (July 18) and runs through August 3. This year’s festival is directed by the brilliant Sir Wayne McGregor CBE, resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet and artistic director of Studio Wayne McGregor. He was appointed director of the Dance Department of La Biennale di Venezia in 2020, and while his term was supposed to end after this year, his curation has been so exceptional that it was recently announced he will remain in the position for a further two years.
In McGregor’s festival introduction, he writes that this year’s Biennale Danza will explore “the very nature of what it is to be human. An eternal quest that has occupied priests and poets, philosophers and politicians, scientists and artists” for millennia. This year’s featured choreographers and companies are preoccupied with “unwrapping the great complexity, contradictions and mystery that is human life.” And more than once he reminds us that “we Humans are movement.”
We Humans includes seven world premieres, two European premieres and eleven Italian premieres from both emerging and established dance makers. Over the course of the dance festival’s seventeen days, 160 artists will take part in 80 events. McGregor’s is a feat of creative execution both amazing and overwhelming, so we have put together a guide to the Biennale Danza shows that shouldn’t be missed.
The Lions
Each year, the director of the Dance Department recommends artists to the Board of Directors of La Biennale di Venezia for two prestigious awards: the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and the Silver Lion (dedicated to cutting-edge dance makers and institutions). Past Golden Lions include icons Merce Cunningham (1995), Pina Bausch (2007) and William Forsythe (2010). Past Silver Lions include Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (2010), Oona Doherty (2021) and Tao Dance Theater (2023).
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The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of Biennale Danza 2024 is Italian-Swedish dancer, choreographer and experimental theoretician Cristina Caprioli and the Silver Lion is the radical American choreographer Trajal Harrell. You can attend the awards ceremony on July 21, but more than that, we recommend seeing their incredible work.
Caprioli’s dances are highly conceptual, and McGregor calls her choreography “a critical discourse in continuous motion.” To watch her work is to step inside her precise yet expansive mind. Her show-installation flat haze (7/24-7/28, 7/30-8/3) is an examination of her creative process—expect white noise, dim lights and contemplation. It is performed by nine dancers over nine hours, though spectators are encouraged to come and go as they please. The solo Deadlock (7/25-7/28, 8/1-8/3), performed by Louise Dahl, combines live performance and film projection to create “an essay on repetition in series.” (Imagine this piece in conversation with Lucinda Child’s minimalist Dance (1979).) Silver (7/27, 7/28, 8/2, 8/3) is her most visually stunning and, perhaps, most accessible work at the Biennale. Hundreds of silver coats will take over the space, while her company dances around, with and through them.
While Caprioli’s choreographies are highly cerebral, the work of the Silver Lion of Biennale Danza 2024 very much lives in the body. Harrell is known for mixing Vogue dance, postmodern dance and Butoh. This unique blend is on display in both his intimate solo Sister or He Buried the Body (7/18 and 7/19), which explores Butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata’s connection with American anthropologist and choreographer Katherine Dunham, and the ensemble piece Tambourines (8/2 and 8/3), a feminist reimagining of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
Fresh new choreographies
For the past three years, the Biennale Danza has put out a call for new work by both national and international artists under the age of 35. From 350 submissions, three projects were selected to be commissioned and premiere at the festival.
The winner of the international call is the Argentinian director, stage designer, visual artist and choreographer Melisa Zulberti. Her new project Posguerra (7/20 and 7/21) is described as “a multidisciplinary immersion in the post-war body.” It will combine live music, live streaming cameras,and nine dancers suspended mid-air to create, as McGregor said in a statement, “a daring audio-visual ecosystem” that examines the concept of circular time.
One of the Italian companies to win the national call is the collective Miller de Nobili Dance Theatre. Their new work There Was Still Time (7/30 and 7/31), choreographed by Chiara de’ Nobili and Alexander Miller and inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, will focus on social connection and existential dread through breaking, contemporary dance and urban dance theater.
While There was Still Time brings audiences into the future, Folklore Dynamics (7/30 and 7/31) transports them into the past. Folklore Dynamics is the new work by the other winners of the national call: Noemi Dalla Vecchia and Matteo Vignali, known collectively as Vidavé. The piece mines the disappearing Italian folk traditions and dialects through contemporary dance.
Other highlights of the Biennale Danza
A few of the shows mix dance and technology in truly exciting ways. Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, celebrating its 50th anniversary, will show its European premiere of Waves (7/18 and 7/19), a collaboration between artistic director and choreographer Cheng Tsung-lung and Japanese digital artist and programmer Daito Manabe. Waves is a performance featuring twelve dancers and their digital avatars. Using sensors, the dancers “transform movement into digital data,” generating the visual and audio elements. In Swiss choreographer Nicole Seiler’s Human in the Loop (7/24 and 7/25), computers randomly dictate choreography to the two dancers through Bluetooth headphones while they perform. In British choreographer and photographer Benji Reid’s Find Your Eyes (7/31 and 8/1), Reid invites audiences into his studio practice by creating live projected images of the three dancers as they perform on the stage.
The Afro-Colombian company Sankofa Danzafro, founded by Rafael Palacios in 1997, will make its Italian debut with Behind the South: Dances for Manuel (7/24 and 7/25), a tribute to Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella’s Changó, el Gran Putas.
Closing out the festival is the world premiere of We Humans Are Movement (8/2 and 8/3), the perfectly-titled collaboration between Company Wayne McGregor and the talented young students of the Biennale College program. Set in the historic Sala Grande in the Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido, the site-specific work is an ode to cinema, movement, and—of course—humans.
And if you ever tire of watching the human body move, you can take a break and look inside of it with De Humani Corporis Fabrica. This film installation, by anthropologists and filmmakers Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, was created from over 350 hours of footage from endoscopic technologies in five Paris hospitals. It will be on view at the Sala d’Armi throughout the Biennale Danza.