2025

Info

We open the festival with On the Poetics of Touch by choreographer Mariana Gavriciuc, who transforms the embrace into a socio-affective laboratory. In the body symphonic, Lebanese choreographer Charlie Prince stages the body as a political and poetic manifesto, while Turkish choreographer Filiz Bozkuş Al, through her work Gong, invites us into “a place unknown by name, yet deeply familiar within each of us.”

The creations GAITLESS, Masterwork for Six Dancers, and This is Unreal delve into the hybrid and paradoxical dimensions of corporeality. In GAITLESS, Uroš Krčadinac, Marko Milić & MIREVI explore the body’s act of escape from technological surveillance. In Masterwork, Emese Cuhorka & Csaba Molnár playfully addresses the objectified body striving for autonomy, freeing itself from cultural projections. Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard return to CNDB with the final version of This is Unreal, in which the body confronts its own digital cloning and the limits of simulated reality in the deepfake era.

In SCREENAGERS Vol.2, Giuseppe Chico & Barbara Matijević turn emotional introspection into a DIY musical plugged into the chaotic media landscape of the digital age. Baby, created by the collective Hollow – choreographer and performer Viktor Szeri, media artist and game designer Tamás Páll, and curator and writer Gyula Muskovics – proposes an artistic genealogy through a virtual creature, placing creation within a horizon of possible worlds. Here, affect, confession, and the promises of technology merge to reveal how digital media shape our collective imagination.

Both 153 Seconds by director Ioana Păun and ACTING OUT by Mihai Lukács present the body as a living archive of trauma and as a tool of resistance. Together, they trace a continuum of memory in which performance art becomes a space for transmission and intergenerational solidarity, standing against forgetting.

Iridescent Dances brings to the stage the youngest among us—the participants of CNDB’s Performative School for Children—embedding within the festival not only a playful dimension but also a horizon of the future. This moment becomes a necessary counterpoint: the small, fragile, yet potent body as bearer of time to come.

We thus present a series of promises of reimagination, in which the body is a living territory – not only subject to pressure but also capable of regeneration, resistance, and transformation.

We are delighted that all this is possible thanks to the solid international partnerships CNDB has built through its involvement in the international networks AEROWAVES and Moving Balkans, as well as its participation in the European project MODINA – Movement, Digital Intelligence and Interactive Audience.

We invite you to join the artists and their creations for a new edition of the Iridescent Festival, where contemporary dance and the performing arts not only reflect reality but also shape its transformative potential.

Mihai Mihalcea
Director of Programs and Projects, on behalf of the entire CNDB team

Period
November 1-30, 2025

Schedule
1.11 – On the Poetics of Touch, by Mariana Gavriciuc | CNDB
2.11 – 153 seconds, by Ioana Păun | CNDB
3.11 – 153 seconds, by Ioana Păun | CNDB
5.11 – This is Unreal, by Pierre Godard & Liz Santoro | CNDB
7.11 – Hollow: Baby, by Viktor Szeri, Tamás Páll, Gyula Muskovics | CNDB
9.11 –  Gaitless, by Uroš Krčadinac & Marko Milić × MIREVI  | CNDB
12.11 – Acting Out, by Mihai Lukács | CNDB
15.11 – Gong, by Filiz Bozkuş Al | CNDB
16.11 – Tiny Iridescent Dances, by students of the Performing art school for children | CNDB
18.11 – the body symphonic, by Charlie Prince  | CNDB
23.11 – Black, by Oulouy  | CNDB
26.11 – MASTERWORK for six dancers & Gala Premiilor CNDB  | TNB, Studio Hall

Supported by
Ministerul Culturii, Aerowaves, Moving Balkans, MODINA, Creative Europe, Teatrul Național București, Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest, Cinema Union, Cărturești

Media Partners
Scena9, Zile și Nopți, Adevărul, Agerpress, Elle, Happ.ro, Liternet, TVR Cultural, Radio România Cultural, Revista Arta, The Institute, Zeppelin, ISCOADA, Revista Golan, Feeder, Visit Bucharest, Ziarul Metropolis, IQads, Ceașca de Cultură, Modernism.ro, Daily Magazine, Munteanu Recomandă.