(VNF) - The annual dance festival “Europe meets Asia in Contemporary Dance”, coordinated by the Goethe-Institut, will take place for the seventh time this year in Vietnam from September 20^th to 24^th in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

“Europe meets Asia in Contemporary Dance”, an initiative of EUNIC – the Network of European cultural institutes and embassies in Hanoi, is organized this year by the Goethe-Institut, L’Espace, Embassy of Spain, Switzerland and the Consulate General of Canada in HCMC, in cooperation with the Youth Theater Vietnam and the HCMC Dance School.

The festival, has successfully contributed to raising awareness on contemporary dance in Vietnam since 2011.

Dance, an important artistic medium worldwide, is an artistic language which tells stories, expresses mental and emotional conditions in our life, and gives us new perspectives. Topics and techniques, feelings and thoughts, creative energy and perseverance are expressed.

This year, the event are featuring two exciting Vietnamese productions, one by the Wintercearig Project and one by the dance company Arabesque. The spirit of co-production has motivated two other performances, one with Belgian-French and one with German-Vietnamese participation. The festival also showcases the multifaceted dance world outside of Vietnam, and brings dance performances from Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland and Canada.

Three exhibitions on dance and body will enrich the festival this year. They show, among other things that dynamic movements in a space can also emanate in to very special new visual forms for the dance – either in stills or moving pictures.

The spectrum of topics among the performances is pleasingly wide.The intoxicating dance work THE BURROW (DER BAU), created by Berlin-based choreographer Isabelle Schad and French visual artist Laurent Goldring, has been inspired by Franz Kafka’s unfinished novella of the same title, which is about a mole-like creature, digging an elaborate system of tunnels that it has built over the course of its life.

The Burrows (Der Bau) describes the universe of an animal entrenched in a place where every single details have been built to make it feel protected against real and imaginary predators.

The performance of Kim-Sanh Chau is both beautiful and profound. Her exquisitely illuminated dance piece BLACK & SCHOLES with three dancers from the Montreal cultural festival it is about the appearance and disappearance of the inpidual.

Tricia Nguyen goes completely new ways and test the limits of dance for therapy. Her WINTERCEARIG dance project examines symptoms of depression and anxiety disorders.

The Swiss Asphalt Piloten will perform their witty artistic rebellion TAPE RIOT with and against surrounding urban space. Get ready for this flash performance, when the four artists pop up on some street corners in Hanoi and HCMC.

Raquel Madrid and Cipriano López also leave the usual theater space behind and bring dance out into the open. The two Spanish dancers developed their SHORT STORY OF A LONG EVENT on the Mediterranean beach and will bring it now to the shore of the Hoan Kiem Lake.

The Vietnamese-German co-production STIGMERGY with dancers from the Vietnam Dance Academy plays with acting, contacting and communicating. All this combines to a complex, seemingly intelligent structure, which arises without the need for planning, control or direct communication between the dancers.

URBAN DISTORTIONS is Franco-Vietnamese with participating musician Teddy Chilla (Nguyen Duc Trung Tuan) and singer Suboi (only in HCMC). You will experience poetry about space and its physical and cultural boundaries. The piece is inspired by the global phenomenon of migration and raises questions: What is habitat, with whom do we share it? How do we perceive strangers and cultural differences?

For more information about the festival schedule, tickets, dance pieces, the artists and activities please visit the festival website (hanoidancefestival.com)./.

VNF