What’s all this, then? As a counterbalance to the hectic bootcamp that is the annual Springback Academy, there is, on the flipside of the same year, a Springback Assembly during which we meet at a place or event to discover more about performance, dance, the world, and each other.

In 2026, that place was Warsaw, which had this year opened a new building dedicated to dance: the Dance Pavilion, directed by Renata Piotrowska-Auffret and Alicja Berejowska. At the time of our visit – 3–6 September – Warsaw’s Nowy Teatr was also hosting the 10th Generation After festival of new performance. And to top these happy coincidences, our new Polish Springback member Franek Dziduch has just moved back to Warsaw from Amsterdam, and was able to act as our brilliant guy-on-the-ground for the Assembly.

Renata treated us to an illuminating history to the Pavilion and to the Polish dance scene, while Franek, building on his recent master’s programme in the Netherlands, continued a recurring Springback theme, questioning the assumptions, histories and positions behind what some of us might call ‘eastern Europe’.

Always a stimulating and very personable encounter, the Assembly also leads to some written outcomes. You can read about the Pavilion in Poland in a text by Lena Megyeri, about contemporary Polish performance from Franek’s viewpoint, and about other performances and events that we attended this year, including an almost anonymous performance for a man and a bridge, a valse around the Vistula, and a touchy-feely sculpture-park tour. At the same time, I was keen to encourage some exploratory angles and approaches to writing (‘put the fun into the functional!’) – and you can see what that produced in various texts that I have labelled here as ‘freeform’.

Enjoy.