Moritz Ostruschnjak: NON+ULTRAS

Moritz Ostruschnjak, a choreographer coming from the field of breakdance and graffiti, refines and expands his distinctive collage-like choreographic approach in his latest work NON+ULTRAS (2025), presented at the 40th edition of Romaeuropa festival. Combining corporeal and projected imagery drawn from mass culture, he explores one of today’s most pressing social issues, fanaticism. In NON+ULTRAS, the highly charged symbol of the football scarf, woven with mottos and team names, is embedded into a multi-layered choreography that looks like cultural embroidery.

Meticulously arranging approximately 500 football scarves side by side, the eight dancers create a colourful striped carpet. As they raise some of these scarves, we read ‘Juventus’, ‘Argentina’, ‘Korea’ and more, and gradually tableaux vivants inspired from the iconography of sports fandom organically emerge. Scenes of ecstatic celebration alternate with the agony of victory or the despair of defeat, shaping collective emotional entanglements and culminating in symbolic mouth-to-mouth exchanges of breath. In an expression of exhilaration, the dancers toss their scarves into the air and then tile them at equal distances, forming a grid reminiscent of graves that evokes the futility of extremism. Lying comfortably on each other along the arc of a scarf-made circle, they innocently and peacefully sing Doris Day’s ‘Che serà serà’. Soundless screams incorporate fanaticism, and an empowering sound collage fuses sports anthems and oriental sounds that galvanise the dancers to bounce in a tour de force of stamina. In the background, a dense and eclectic video projection, inspired by the visual archive of the football field, unfolds in parallel with the performance, depicting among other red flares, packed or muddy stadiums and mangas of Japanese culture.

Playing between order and mess, celebration and loss, NON+ULTRAS explores the ultras movement as an extension of extreme political ideology and religious fervour. Football fandom acts as a pretext to reflect on the human need for belonging in a community, even if harmful – bringing to mind Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’ that transcend national borders to tie people, even unknown to each other, through deeply shared beliefs. With urgency and a touch of lightness, the visual languages of video and choreography interlace in a thoughtful work that sharply criticises polarisation and its consequences.

For more on Romaeuropa Festival 2025, visit springback.org/magazine/2025/12/eternal-flame-romaeuropa-2025