This year was Springback Academy’s 10th birthday and an important milestone both for the project and for me. My 17-hour train journey back to Brussels after the festival presented the ideal pretext for pondering the persistently unfathomable nature of the passing of time. 

Thanks to Springback Academy, I’ve watched around 9000 minutes of Aerowaves dance; the equivalent of nigh on a whole week of round-the-clock shows. Yet my first Springback Academy in Barcelona in 2015, alarmingly, feels like it happened yesterday. It’s this type of delusion that confirms the subjectivity of time spent in a theatre. What makes a performance meaningful and the minutes fly by or, by contrast, what makes you fear the experience its dangerously shortening your life expectancy? There have been plenty of professional burnouts in our field, and it’s clear there’s an increasing impulse to push against the pressure of speed that seems to be engulfing the world. In 2022 the Springback Assembly theme was ‘slowing down’ and ‘doing less’. At this edition of Spring Forward several of the performances seemed to be endeavouring to stretch and bend our perception of time. 

The festival began with Joanna Holewa Chrona and Yared Tilahun Cederlund’s Waterkind. Both artists are DJs and their background is street dance, a form I associate with speedy body-popping and dizzy-making head spinning. But here, the duo’s movements and facial expressions were slowed down to a virtual standstill. The palpable tension between their sensual, no-touch tenderness and an ominous feeling that something terrible might happen to flout it was riveting. I was also gripped with suspense as my preconceptions had been upended: I had been resigned to watching something familiar, and was now challenged to probe my own dogmatic mindset. 

Other shows got me questioning repetition and predictability. Can they alter time? In a good way? Or make it drag? Next on the bill was Glory Game by Dominik Więcek and Sticky Fingers Club. Six, naked, athletic-bodied performers ‘run’, in impeccable slow-motion, back and forth within the lines of a rectangle covered in sand. I was glued to every twitch and ripple of their muscles, felt every swivel of a kneecap in mine and noticed every drop of sweat beading on a brow. Their incredible, collective and ultra-controlled physical feat must have lasted about 20 minutes, and would have kept me engrossed if it had continued for another 20. Finally, they magicked costumes from under the sand. Although we could predict they would all slowly get dressed, this second chapter gave resolution to the first: the naked truth of the competitive world of sports in two acts. 

In contrast, Sirens, whose two albeit incredible dancers, iterated every possible variation of aestheticised, archly artificial porny sex moves felt deadening in its predictability. Even the literal change of tune – after a relentlessly repetitive electro-techno beat, performer Chara Kotsali begins to sing a folk song acappella whilst Adonis Vais continues to dance – felt like a clipped-on coda that served to confound rather than illuminate what had gone before.

But then there was Shiraz by Armin Hokmi that told, through its unflinching repetition and the seven dancers’ minute gestural shifts, a deeply textured truth. Lodged in the historic fact of the demise of an Iranian dance festival in the 70s, the resilience of Shiraz’s form meant the multilayered implications of the event resounded in the here and now. Or Gush is Great, by Production Xx, a witty yet cutting comment on the trashiness of the world in a one-take, slow-mo (once again) six-person saunter from stage back to stage front.

Returning to ‘measurable’ time, the 40 minutes maximum rule for Aerowaves presentations was used (and sometimes abused) by most artists. Often one last idea, movement phrase, lighting effect or musical track was shoehorned in when everything they had to offer had already happened. Could-and-should-be endings are sometimes fatal, both to an audience’s appreciation which, once our capacity for absorption has been exceeded, can quickly turn hostile, and to an artist’s career. The Springbackers were rigorously shaving the superfluous from their reviews and some writers felt sharply that the artists should be doing the same; that some shows would be better with 10–15 minutes edited out. A clear casualty of this over zealousness (or lack of a tough-love outside eye) was Work in Progress by Camelia Neagoe. The duet, performed by Eva Danciu and Mariana Gavriciuc, about resisting the pressures of work in a capitalistic society, lost us because, well, it worked too hard and unnecessarily to fill the whole 40 minutes. 

One piece of which we (almost) unanimously wanted more was AFTER ALL by Solène Weinachter. Such a universal theme (death) treated with enchanting humour and masterful faux-flippancy. We were few not to both laugh and cry. For me, AFTER ALL brought the notion of passing of time into bittersweet relief. It was one of the last shows that Aerowaves founder John Ashford had been able to see at The Place theatre in London before he died in 2023. He’d kindly taken my daughter too. She’s at the beginning of a career in the arts and, at 24, is the age that I was when I first met John at The Place in 1987. And later that day, I learnt of the death of Jean-Paul Montanari, the founding director of the Montpellier Dance Festival, on whose stage I’d performed as a professional dancer for the last time in 1986. Another doux-amer recollection.

But every year it becomes clearer to me that, despite all those hours of watching dance clocked up on my personal counter, what makes time spent in a theatre feel valuable and vibrant is being able to see even the over-familiar, the oft-repeated and sometimes the plain boring from ever different perspectives. It is a privilege and a gift to have ten (or fourteen counting the team of Springback mentors) new pairs of bright and sharply focused peepers to see through, as well as my own somewhat time-tarnished ones.