The moment I received the news that I had been accepted into Springback Academy, I felt I urgently needed to improve my English writing skills. Just reading and writing random texts about my day didn’t help. So I began to rewrite other dance critics’ reviews, replacing the performance details with scenes from my own life. My favorite local bar’s wood terrace became the setting of a ‘groundbreaking interpretation of a classical story’. My friends, standing outside in a blizzard with frozen fingers struggling to keep cigarette stubs lit, created a ‘fundamental ensemble performance’. One friend, a poet who was wearing a fur coat from a secondhand store, proved the costume designer’s ability to create ‘real, yet impossible characters’, and the rest of us, in thin fabric coats that made us look like French intellectuals from the 1960s, ‘slowly started to sync into a shiver of choreography’.

Nietzsche taught me to view my life as a work of art. But reimagining it as a review – like a performance unfolding in acts – did something much bigger and more important. It allowed me to evaluate and appreciate its ups and downs on a broader scale, its timing, dramaturgy, and cast of characters – along with moods, movement, and subtle references to other works. This reinterpretion of Brian Seibert’s New York Times review of Justin Peck’s Mystic Familiar, published in January, seemed to apply perfectly to my life:

Once more, but better, which premiered at midnight on January 1, will be divided into an as yet unknown number of parts, each named after an emotion felt over the year ahead: stress, confusion, satisfaction, and so on. One section flows into the next, as Laura and her environment change character and the approximately 20-member cast changes costumes. At the start, the dancers wear winter clothes and rush across the stage because of the cold. Then a person enters, wearing a trench coat and walking slowly in the opposite direction, and we know that ‘Winter’ has ceded to ‘Spring’.

Now, after Springback Academy, I feel it – spring is here. It’s not a cliché: I climbed up the airplane stairs in Riga, the cold wind slapping my face, and stepped back out into warm Italy. Reviewing dance performances in Riga always feels almost like a crime to me. I would often avoid opening my notebook until the lights went down in the auditorium. The blank page seemed to glow in the dark, like a promise to the world – one that I couldn’t fulfill.

But seeing a row of laps with open notebooks and serious faces behind laptop screens during Spring Forward made me feel, for a moment, as if I had found my way through the underground. We were still like moles – hidden in the shadows of the performances and retreating to our hotel rooms – yet never alone. The first day of the Academy, we sat around a table, and I looked at everyone’s faces and expressions. It was a scene of characters that felt movingly whole – detailed and effortlessly real, a review might say.

For the next three days, these characters disappeared into an unpredictable yet harmonious flock, creating an ever-changing, gurgling pattern. The movement was mostly casual, with random splurges of grand jetés and piqués in a hotel lobby. The flock’s units were often drawn to one another through conversations ranging from the local peculiarities of the dance scene to opposing opinions about recent experiences – forming smaller and larger circles with the intensity of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, performed in Paul Taylor’s spirit of joy. Some performers’ timing was always a bit off, but the company can be praised for its unified patience in waiting for latecomers. They were always ready to let another dance performance imprint itself on their minds – only to resurface days, months, or even years later.

In that sense, the 2025 spring programme swelled beyond its usual cast. Hundreds in light jackets gathered in the auditoriums of Nova Gorica and Gorizia – and somewhere in that crowd, there I was. Let’s say – four stars.