Founded in 1971 in the inland province of Rimini, Santarcangelo Festival (SF) is one of the longest-living performing arts festivals in Italy. This year’s edition (3–12 July 2026) was special for two reasons: first, because it saw the conclusion of the final year of Polish curator Tomasz Kirenczuk as director of the festival after five challenging years marked internationally by the outbreak of the pandemic, the eruption of new and unconcluded wars, the escalating of the environmental crisis and the rise of right-wing ideologies. Second, because the festival managed to reaffirm its position in the international map of performing arts festivals as a must-visit artistic and cultural destination despite severe public funding cuts in 2025. Framing itself as a cultural hub that confronts the ‘deep pressures’ (the theme of this year’s festival) of the present, SF invites audiences to question entrenched assumptions and imagine new forms of action, resistance and resilience.
The opening weekend featured Bast Hippocrate’s piece Joyaux Lourdement Sous-estimés, an intimate duet with William Cardoso that explores the boundaries between oppression and possession, symbiosis and survival. Agnietė Lisičkinaitė returned to this year’s SF with CLAP & SLAP, created with Igor Shugaleev, reflecting on self-exile in the aftermath of the 2020 anti-Russian protests in Belarus. Alongside works by other returning artists such as Marah Haj Hussein and Wojciech Grudziński, the overall dense programme was the outcome of handpicked performances, music concerts, screenings and talks in outdoor and unconventional venues of the small medieval city. Some recurring ideas emerged: breathing as choreography shaped by ‘deep pressures’, and attempts to ‘un-police’ the body in order to free it.
Choreographing breathing
On a small wooden platform in the Baden Powell park, in the countryside of Santarcangelo, two sand circles intersect like a Venn diagram at the start of KMs of Resistance by Moroccan choreographer Mehdi Dahkan. Bare-chested, Dahkan forces himself to exhale; the loud sound of his breath seeks our attention, signalling his suffering and exhaustion. As his dragging feet, which allude to the lack of oxygen in his body, gradually erase the sand contours, another performer, Mohamed Bouriri, snarls like an animal from afar and approaches us, out of breath. When their bodies meet, their breathing gets quieter and calmer, settling into a rhythmic and syncopated composition followed by moments of apnea. In sheer proximity, they breathe into each other’s mouths: giving and taking oxygen at once. Locking their heads beneath one another’s armpits, as if ready to start Roman wrestling, they enter into a competition over who will gain more oxygen, and gently encourage us to join them in a collective choreography of breathing. KMs of Resistance inevitably brings to mind George Floyd’s last words, reminding us that the need for social justice is not only urgent but breathing remains a ‘universal right’ that cannot be appropriated nor controlled. At the same time, the work calls attention to breathing as a primary form of life that can communicate needs and desires when words are forbidden.
For HA [also reviewed here], Latvian performer Jana Jacuka welcomes the audience into a school gym transformed into a performance space. In black clothes contrasting her white skin framed by her long blonde hair, she seeks to build eye contact with the audience before delivering, centre stage, a series of observations, facts and questions, each ending mechanically and impersonally with the exclamation ‘HA’: ‘how do you feel? / HA’; ‘surprise birthday party / HA’. Sometimes the syllabi are united to form ‘HA-HA’ or ‘HA-HA-HA’, but always in the same awkward, cold and alienated tone. As the work progresses, Jacuka delves into the emotional and dramaturgical possibilities of these two letters, shifting between surprise, irony, terror or simply panic as when we lose our keys or forget our passwords. After drinking a glass of milk, her voice moves from animal-like grunts to sustained tones that range from deep, masculine frequencies to siren-like pitches, transforming herself from an angel to a heroine of an Ancient Greek tragedy. Expanding the legacy of choreographic research into the physicality of laughter – as in works such as Ha! Ha! by Maguy Marin or AH HA by Lisbeth Gruwez – HA develops with originality, through Jacuka’s impeccable interpretation, its own distinct investigation in the visceral qualities of the sound of laughter. Through muscular contractions and vocal textures, Jacuka conveys what remains beyond language, directing attention toward unspoken forms of trauma.
Un-policing the body
Bow by Polish choreographer Wojciech Grudziński is a trio based on the exhaustive repetition of a single movement, and variations of its spatial organisation in relationship with the performers and the surrounding audience members, seated in the town’s central square. Grudziński refers to this movement as ‘bow’, but it could well be a slow headbanging, a waving of the performers’ upside-down upper bodies, a repeated drop and rebound, or a fall and recovery. Through the non-stop bouncing of their inverted spines, their shirts gradually slip to the floor, revealing identical tattoos across their backs. Energised and numbed by repetition, the trio persists despite accumulating fatigue. Bowing becomes a gesture of submission to the audience, a readiness to be in service to and in honour of them. Through a simple choreographic structure based on repetition (and inevitably difference), the rather masochistic practice to endure pain and exhaustion brings the bodies but also our gaze to a condition of a mutual vanishing in front of each other.
Marah Haj Hussein and Nur Garabli, both from occupied Palestine, question – as the spoken dialogue that unfolds throughout the piece In relation to whom? reveals – whether the body can ever forget what it has absorbed through embodied training and discipline. With their dynamic and robust female physicalities, Hussein and Garabli move with precision in sequences inspired by yoga poses and western dance techniques; they reflect on the effects of potty training on the neurological system of toddlers, and on the contradictions of release-based practices. Toy soldiers become objects of imitation; a shared braid – recalling Marina Abramović and Ulay’s iconic performance Relation in Time, exploring endurance – transforms them into conjoined figures. The work seems to ask: how long can the body endure its militarisation? On a reflective surface evoking the Mediterranean Sea, the performers’ bodies appear distorted and liquid. Drawing parallels between dance training and military discipline that shape and control the body and the mind in specific manners, Hussein and Garabli position the dancer as soldier and the soldier as dancer, echoing André Lepecki’s notion of choreopolicing in understanding war. Against these structures of control, the rediscovery of Palestinian traditional dance emerges as a gesture of bodily liberation and demilitarisation, sustaining embodied memories and cultural identities that resist erasure.
BOW, HA and, to some extent, KMs of resistance each take a simple movement, sound or corporeal function – the gesture of gratitude that takes place at the end of a performance, a two-letter exclamation and the vital mechanism of life – and push it to exhaustion. This is at once courageous and rewarding. Together with In relation to whom?, these pieces address the artists’ deepest felt pressures that reflect urgent topics of our present while working politically in ways that activate our thinking. ●
For the second part of Springback’s coverage at Santarcangelo Festival 2026, see ‘Kilometres of dance, and singular solos’ by Dmitrijus Andrušanecas and Ingeborg Zackariassen
3–12.07.2026 Santarcangelo, Italy