Detail and difference at STHLM DANS
- C-print
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
STHLM DANS May 5–13, 2026
Various venues, Stockholm and Botkyrka
For a long time — possibly forever — dance theories and practices have surfaced and located tensions about detail and difference. Bodies moving together in unison, whether ballet corps or drill teams, have always presented observers with opportunities to compare people and identify outliers. Those who perform alone aren’t immune when the choreography is fixed. Any soloist might be compared, favorably or otherwise, to someone who interpreted the same role the night before or even decades earlier. Although many conversations about dance include mentions of “personal expression,” many individuals experience dance training as a project of their entrainment, whereby the spontaneous physical impulses of a child are channeled over time, through repetition and structure, toward containment within a technique.
Choreographic detail tends to dissipate over distance. A work shown in an intimate setting for an audience of 25 can include gestural intricacies that a Super Bowl halftime show likely won’t. The choreographers of dance for arenas and opera house stages tend to use broader brush strokes, focusing their instructions on what arms and legs, not fingers and toes, should do. Yet many of today’s most acclaimed and successful dance makers have chosen to capitalize on the power of dance at close proximity. Another incentive for producing dance at more modest scales is that it alleviates, if not solves for, some of the ephemeral art form’s problematic economics. Two hundred bodies performing on tour need costumes to wear, meals to eat, and hotel rooms to sleep in. It is simply cheaper to present three dancers from Italy two times at a cultural center.
During its recent, fifth iteration at venues in Stockholm and Botkyrka, STHLM DANS seemed to center and indeed celebrate that aspect. While again presenting artists and groups from across Europe, it also narrowed its scope for the Baltic Take Over, a regional festival within the 2026 festival. Jacopo Jenna’s trio Manifestus featuring Simone De Giovanni, Petra Audrey Mangoua Youaleu, and Phex brought the intricacy of a Raimondi engraving to hip hop at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Stoccolma. The three dancers used their hands and fingers to make masks with fluttering eyelashes for each other’s faces, before sampling the Bart Simpson and other throwback moves. During a conversation beforehand with local artist Freddy Houndekindo, Jenna explained how Manifestus was inspired in part by how prominently manual gestures figure into Italian speech, and likened the expressive potential of choreographic detail to enlivening the content of a text through calligraphy. Houndekindo invited everyone present to “try to read the histories” embedded in hip hop movement vocabulary throughout the performance.
Along similar lines, Lilian Steiner’s 45-minute lecture-performance Dance Becomes Her — the inaugural presentation of her artistic residency at SKF/Konstnärshuset — unpacked the personal meanings of embodying actions invented and taught to her by numerous choreographers. Steiner, like fellow mixed repertory interpreters whose careers were built on their ability to shape-shift and inhabit diverse movement vocabularies, appears to be in a moment of reflection about what that says about (and means to) her. “The dancing body is a tool” acquired through dancing itself, she observed, while demonstrating phrases and scraps from perhaps hundreds of exercises she’s practiced and performed before. “My thoughts are an accumulation of other people’s thoughts,” she continued, suggesting that these processes have somehow changed her mind from the outside in. “Repetition is the generation of difference,” she added, noting that, over the course of dozens of performances of Split (2017) by Lucy Guerin, that work got not easier for her, but more difficult.
In conversation at Dansens Hus, over a fake campfire plugged into an electrical outlet, Samuli Emery (Finland), Mia Habib (Norway), and Charlotta Öfverholm (Sweden) spoke with Ars Navitas cofounder Virve Sutinen about their pathways into dance and about what, for each of them, has occurred “with experience, and despite it,” one throughline being sacrifice. (On a tight budget while a dance student in Oslo, Habib froze loaves of bread from her grandmother’s house and rationed for herself just two slices per day. Öfverholm said mice were on the menu during a period she spent in Kentucky.) Emery spoke thoughtfully about the advantages they enjoyed as a young student coded male, and about their journey toward recognizing how their exposure to hip hop and vogue was divorced in Finland from the Black roots of those forms. Over time, that conversation “opened up,” said Emery, who added that their questions today included asking, “What’s my place? What’s my space?”
Evening events at Dansens Hus included back-to-back performances of Courtney May Robertson’s HUNTER and Björn Safsten’s Hemsökt åtrå (Haunted Desires, reviewed last year for C-print by Koshik Zaman). Robertson’s solo to a throbbing, industrial score by Acidic Male was in some sense a duet with a copy of herself: a life-sized doll, whose hair Robertson braided onstage to match her own. HUNTER is, “at its core, about dangerously obsessive desire,” Robertson wrote, “the kind of intoxicating desire that grabs you by the throat and pins you down and takes your life.” In a dance-performance context, it was possible to also read her duet with an effigy as a struggle with the images of one’s self that exist and metastasize in virtual spaces. To circle back to this idea of dance practice as entrainment to homogeneity, we are now confronted nearly every day with how algorithms and software aggressively incentivize sameness (and sometimes punish dissent). Watching Robertson and her doll duel to a symbolic death in near darkness produced in me a strange sensation of empowerment. She completed the performance alone and undressed, standing in a shallow, triangular pool of what looked like blood, having exorcized and vanquished her double. It looked to me like an accurate representation of quitting Instagram.
Some of the most intricate, detailed movements we make are coordinations among the small muscles in our mouths and tongues that generate speech. (As a new student of Swedish, I’m freshly attuned to how difficult it can be to break such patterns and learn new ones.) STHLM DANS included a lip sync workshop with drag performer Wet Mess (United Kingdom), in addition to two performances of their work TESTO. An opportunity to “delve into oral history and naturalistic lip sync” and to “look at combining the two,” the workshop proposed theatrical, facial expressions as yet another form of dance, as any drag performer can tell you they absolutely are. This also-ancient art form is optimized for intimate settings. One can’t sit too far from the stage and still catch the perfect timing and subtle wit of a momentarily arched eyebrow or a lip trembling with slightly exaggerated, silent vibrato.
Are STHLM DANS and other festivals restoring live performance to its optimal scope? Do international gatherings of dance artists still need to involve large ensembles on huge stages? Has the advent of high-definition video fundamentally changed the logic of dance presentation? Camera operators from SVT filled the front row at the May 8 showing of Haunted Desires at Dansens Hus. More people may ultimately see that work on screen than they ever will in person. Its details would be clearly visible in crisp, well-lit 4K, but will it be as apparent through video that an extended dialogue at the center of Safsten’s work is lip-synched by the dancers to prerecorded audio? Maybe so. Maybe not.
At any rate, it’s a blessing and a privilege to enjoy the efforts of everyone who makes intercultural convenings like STHLM DANS possible. As I wrote in the July 2023 issue of Dance Magazine, “one of the dance industry’s greatest assets is its internationality. Many techniques are practiced worldwide and few performances incorporate speech, helping dance artists and productions cross borders and seas.” Dance has always been one of our most effective vehicles for cultural diplomacy and exchange. Whether the participating companies and stages are big or small maybe isn’t so important, as long as the artists can keep moving from one place to another, can keep being heard and seen, can keep doing what they do.
Zachary Whittenburg
Zachary Whittenburg has been a journalist, administrator, photographer, and grantmaker in arts and culture since 2008. A regular contributor to Dance Magazine and former dance editor at Time Out Chicago magazine, he has written for numerous additional publications including Critical Correspondence, Critical Read, Dance International, Flavorwire, Pointe, and Total Theatre UK.