National Premiere
BOYS IN THE SAND
Produced by
Choreography
With
Angel Bogar, Koen Kaya Eye, Michele Simi
About
As a continuation of the creative week, Adi Schwarz presents the short version of his acclaimed work Boys in the Sand, created in 2025. The piece explores intimacy, vulnerability, and collective strength through male physicality, blending tenderness and playfulness within a charged, poetic atmosphere. Featured as a professional highlight within the festival’s evening program, the performance offers students and audiences the opportunity to experience Adi Schwarz’s artistic language in a full production context.
LE PREFICHE
Produced by
Choreography and Direction
Dramaturgy
Gregor Acuña-Pohl
Sound Design
Lorenzo Cimarelli
Music
Ninna Nanna — Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino
Monk: Masks — Theo Bleckmann, Katie Geissinger, Ching Gonzalez,
John Hollenbeck, Meredith Monk, Allison Sniffin
Maria Ramon de Palma — Coetus
Original composition — Lorenzo Cimarelli
About
Le Prefiche is a ritual journey following four professional mourners — women who openly express grief on behalf of those who cannot, or do not know how to, give voice to their emotions during a funeral. The tradition of the prefiche spans centuries and cultures, from ancient Egyptian rites to Mediterranean mourning practices, offering communities a way to navigate loss and collective sorrow. Each woman carries her own emotional language and presence, guiding others through preparation, invocation, lament, and remembrance. Alongside pain lies a quiet dignity — the fulfillment that comes from serving a profound human purpose: bringing people together in moments of separation. Between life and death, joy and suffering, presence and absence, Le Prefiche reflects on grief as a shared human experience — one that, when expressed collectively, becomes transformation.
PERHAPS EVERYBODY HAS A GARDEN OF EDEN
Award
Winner of the 2025 Copenhagen Made choreography competition, initiated by The Royal Danish Ballet Foundation
Choreography
Makeup artist
Sheila Iselle
About
This work explores how love transforms perception — of the world, of others, and of ourselves. Not the narrative of love, but its quiet, internal force: the way it shapes identity, memory, and destiny.
Four literary figures serve as emotional archetypes rather than as characters in a shared story.
Marcel, inspired by In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust, embodies love as memory and obsession — an idealized longing that reveals both beauty and the fragile instability of desire.
The Übermensch, from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, represents love as affirmation—not romantic attachment, but a profound acceptance of life itself (amor fati), in which suffering and joy become catalysts for transformation.
Jane Eyre, from Charlotte Brontë’s novel, expresses love as integrity. Her emotional strength lies in choosing autonomy and moral truth over surrender, making love a path toward equality and self-definition.
Oedipus, from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, embodies love bound to fate. His devotion to family, truth, and responsibility becomes inseparable from tragedy, revealing the limits of human knowledge and control.
These figures do not align with a shared narrative. Instead, they inhabit a suspended space — a landscape of longing, becoming, and recognition — where love becomes a language beyond time and story.
Some experience love as memory, some as creation, some as principle, and some as loss. Together, they reflect the human desire to understand ourselves through connection.
Perhaps everybody carries a Garden of Eden within — a place where love once began, or where we continue to search for it.
