Each day at seven o’clock, we gather in the gymnasium to have lasagna with a glass of wine. There are roughly two hundred and forty-three of us. We mill, we wait, we talk – of fascism, budget cuts, professional gossip, and occasionally, dance. We see people that we have not seen in years, perhaps since meeting in another gymnasium on a different continent. Some of them we are happy to see.

Some of us are here to sell a performance. Some of us are here to buy one. A more refined sensibility might prefer the term curatorial invitation, but this is, nonetheless, a marketplace. We are at the Aerowaves Spring Forward Festival, which brings together about twenty artists and two hundred curators to a different European city each year. The artists, who come from around Europe and each present a new work, are selected from an open call which now receives around seven hundred applications annually. In 2025, the Spring Forward Festival took place in the dual cities of Gorizia and Nova Gorica, which live across the Italian-Slovenian border. As spring crashed into the backside of summer, we watched twenty-one shows across three days.

I am a person who loves dance – I have spent my entire life drinking it like water. But by the fifth show of the day at Spring Forward, my attention was a bashful teenager asking to be excused from the dinner table. Artists travel from across Europe for this singular opportunity to share their work with a congregation of dance’s major stakeholders. I am regretful and ashamed because I find it difficult to stay engaged. Maybe I am alone in this, but maybe I am not.

Spring Forward is a conveyor belt of new dance. Viewed in rapid succession, the twenty-one pieces on show appear firm and bright. Each performance is quick to introduce itself in the hi my name is kind of way. Yet once you read the luggage tag, not many venture out of the frame. Often, whatever happens in the first minute of a piece sticks around for the next forty, just sweatier and faster and perhaps with an ironic slogan writ on cardboard. The reigning dramaturgical structure appears to be a slow crescendo, and most pieces depend on one spiky idea to hold them aloft. But dance is a live art, reliant on transformation for its oxygen. A dance that sits still becomes a dead one, and this is never clearer than when you watch seven in a day.

There are striking images, to be sure – the windswept aluminum banner in Lampyris Noctiluca by Aristide Rontini, or the plastic dog that trots, Sisyphean, across a giant stage in Production Xx’s Gush is Great. When you watch twenty-one shows across three days, it becomes clear how context and content are interconnected, each feeding and determining the course the other takes. The context is compressed because it tries its best to contain the wealth of dance being created today, and yet at the same time artists craft their work in response to this compression and oversaturation, perhaps forgoing more subtle terrain within the dire necessity to somehow stand out. Some performances at Spring Forward bare all flesh, others feature (literal) bananas, or a robot, or a DJ playing a reggaeton remix of Justin Bieber’s 2020 hit single Yummy. Novelty is king, and depth of thought is the party guest we always wish would turn up but seldom does. We are left with dance as a totem to identifiability.

What if dance could be a totem to everything else? A totem to the strange, the unidentifiable, the stuff that haunts you without announcing why or what it is. A totem to the work that transfixes you because you can’t quite give it a name. A totem to movement itself, which would never stay still long enough for you to wrap a luggage tag around its neck, anyway.