October revolutions, inside and out
When you’re active in creative communities, October tends to be busy. By rough count, I attended a dozen performances and more than 25 exhibitions last month. It’s energizing and inspiring to dive into each fall’s cultural harvest, despite the effort. This season, four new dance works stood out and resonated in pairs.
InTension
Rebecca Livaniou October 8, 2026
Värmeverket, Bredäng
Otra cosa que no es una conferencia
Manuel Rodríguez October 10, 2026
Dansens Hus, Stockholm
Solo dance performances can be like glimpses of the future. As they don’t require a choreographer to define or transfer any movement vocabulary, the material can remain ineffable and mysterious — even to its creator. A solo is the best container for blending heterogenous influences and the freedom the form provides, from expectations of consistency and unison, can yield abundant and rich detail. Because dance solos also emerge more often when dance funding is scarce, their presence can be symptomatic of disinvestment in the field. An ensemble that fills the stage is almost always a sort of celebration, a solo presentation almost always more like a confession or a diary entry.
In the capacious black box at Värmeverket, a creative hub and coworking space in Bredäng, Rebecca Livaniou took the split-second decisions and instinctual reactions that determine success or failure in a hip hop dance battle and expanded them into luxurious explorations of possibility. Her cycling and stuttering starts, restarts, and re-restarts visualized record scratches and the scrubbing of video footage by editors choosing the right location for a cut. It was easy to get lost in Livaniou’s performance in part because she was so lost inside it herself. Her half-closed eyelids fluttered as she found her way from one state of being to another, each freer and more fully embodied than the last, as if she was shedding successive layers of inhibition on her way to soaring flight with wings wide open.
InTension was a great showcase for the alignment between Livaniou and composer Kevin “12Twelve” Wedin, who accompanied her live and grooved along with the fluidly mixed, electronic score on his own tracks. A beautifully constructed, skin-toned costume by Amanda Wisselgren amplified even Livaniou’s tiniest actions, as the fabric of each successive layer was lighter in weight and carried each impetus forward in time like an echo.
If InTension was a journey from option to choice, Manuel Rodríguez’s presentation of material from Otra cosa que no es una conferencia followed a perpendicular path from an original to a copy, to a copy of that copy. Although Rodríguez rehearsed, the week before in a studio at Moderna Dansteatern, a version of the ongoing project that included three collaborators, his performance during the Within Practice festival at Dansens Hus was a solo manifestation of some (though not all) of that quartet’s material.
Rodríguez’s starting point was more than anything else a character, a man dressed sharply in a suit and tie plus dress shoes, whose movements and vocalizations seemed compressed and fragmented on the other side of conversion through a series of partially compatible codecs. His stammering movements and rapid-fire, half-lingual gibberish were like artifacts of what might have once been a coherent and professional boardroom proposal. Rodríguez shuddered, stuttered, and stomped staccato around the stage to a score that at times was like audio from a first-person shooter streaming on Twitch, multiple high-tech weapons firing to comprise an arrhythmic, metallic cacophony.
There was fortunately enough clownery and obvious satire to his stage persona that, by the time Rodríguez stood shirtless and struck an approximately victorious pose, many in the audience were chuckling and gave him a big round of applause.
Goodtheatre
Ludde Hagberg, Tilman O’Donnell, Anna Vnuk September 26–October 31, 2026
moment:teater, Gubbängen
Núx brúx
Norrdans October 31, 2026
Dieselverkstaden, Nacka
While Livaniou and Rodríguez kicked off the month with stripped-down, movement-centered solos, October ended with two elaborately staged, multimedia provocations.
Rodríguez appeared to be a loose association of pixels scrambled by digital processes. The three primary members of Goodtheatre’s cast were more like forensic evaluators of those processes, questioning whether and how media manipulation and AI have altered the frame around — perhaps even the purpose of — live performance. Program notes told us that Goodtheatre takes place “several decades into the future,” which might explain why its heart notes smelled like Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play. In that 2012 excavation of storytelling itself, playwright Anne Washburn extrapolated, from one episode of The Simpsons, three acts over 75 years following an apocalypse. Like Otra cosa, Goodtheatre was somewhat self-satirical to its own benefit, more at most times like a political cartoon than a dour manifesto. (The presence of an endearing dog named Rudi lightened the mood throughout, too.) In English, Swedish, and some Norwegian, the actor-dancers shared space and performed past one another toward us viewers, only occasionally addressing each other directly and thus joining a trend I’ve noted elsewhere.
This gave Goodtheatre a flat and frontal, classical air despite its apparent forebears, e.g., postmodernist choreographer and director David Gordon. As if to underline that formal friction, the archival film and video that played throughout nearly all of both acts — on displays as well as curtains and walls through projection — was a multichannel mixtape of work by 20th century American and European dance heroes (Lucinda Childs, Merce Cunningham, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Loïe Fuller, Martha Graham, Jerome Robbins, Twyla Tharp, et al.), a few of them choreographers of color (Alvin Ailey, José Limón), and a lot of classical ballet. The show’s overture was an advanced level ballet class, led by Tilman O’Donnell and underway as the audience entered the theater, for half a dozen students of the Royal Swedish Ballet School. During an extended dance sequence in the middle of the first act, O’Donnell “sampled” multiple works seen onscreen and held chairs proudly overhead as if they were ballerinas.
This produced a second layer of internal friction, between A Big Story that Goodtheatre seemed to aim to tell — about where lineages of Western concert dance will go in the future, if anywhere — and A Small Story about an individual performer’s concerns within a creative process, like Does this experience free or confine me? and Does this role help me grow or demand that I shrink? Since O’Donnell, Ludde Hagberg, and Anna Vnuk are seasoned performers, their metatheatrical embodiment of future artists looking back held our attention. The show’s ambition and resourcefulness were admirable and often delightful but its primary tones — clever and mournful — felt more adjacent than in conversation.
To open its fall season (and first under new artistic director Liz Kinoshita), Norrdans engaged Greek choreographer Chara Kotsali, whose absorption of contemporary aesthetics is comprehensive. Costume designer Periklis Pravitas dressed the dancers up like Olof Marsja sculptures, in bright blue lamé plus brown linen plus white faux fur plus sock garters plus denim with accessories. The wall-to-wall score by Jeph Vanger was aggressively percussive yet continuously modulated and the performers lent their hands, feet, and voices to fleshing it out live, chanting and drumming and rapping and singing. In that way and others, Núx brúx echoed Miet Warlop’s spectacular One Song: Histoire(s) du Théâtre IV, seen here in February; both shows ride a fine line between dance theater and live concert.
An old-school tube TV upstage skipped through channels at the show’s start, catching bits of news broadcasts between SMPTE color bars. There was as much text throughout in supertitles as there was dialogue in Goodtheatre, which is to say, so much that all the reading stole focus from the tireless dancing. As Núx brúx developed from restless ruckus to full-out frenzy, those sentence fragments piled up, scattering suggestions in all directions. They say the news isn’t great, read one. Hail to the teeth grinders, said another. It seems they are preparing us for slaughter, guessed a third. Interstitial timestamps told us the clock was racing from dusk until dawn; it was “almost midnight” shortly after the performance began, then “2:00” soon thereafter, then “3:00” and so on. The dancers often held hands or each other’s shoulders in folk-dance formations, snaking around the stage, galloping in circles, and stomping eight abreast in unison. Choreographically, Núx brúx was as elementary as its staging was maximalist.
If Goodtheatre took place long after a (failed?) revolution, Núx brúx depicted the birth of one, replete with the toppling of a small statue placed close to a footlight, so that its shadow loomed larger than life over the action. The week prior, revolutionary imagery was all over the art fairs of Paris, which closed early due to actual unrest in the streets. There and here, it’s as if artists were trying to conjure change but, then again, shouldn’t they always?
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.