LES PRINTEMPS DE SÉVELIN 2025
From 5 to 23 March 2025, the 27th edition of the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Lausanne will be taking off with the programme of its new director Kylie Walters.
“This year, the festival will find a path between dance and live music, dance and magic, dance and combat, dance and ritual: Traditions will be shared, shaken and stirred,” says Kylie Walters, director of Sévelin 36, who compares the invigorating programme to a mountain bike trail and speaks of an “exhilarating immersion in a danced panorama”. According to her, “the ’mountain bike‘ route of the festival invites us to discover how the different lines and histories of dance intersect, leading to vibrant forms of expression and revealing ways in which we can come together despite our radically contrasting experiences of the world.”
The 2025 edition of Printemps de Sévelin presents new and vital choreographic influences that emerge from traditions to create common ground and unite collectively in a turbulent time.
The programme opens with a carte blanche for the rising star of the international choreography scene, Soa Ratsifandrihana. A sung and danced journey connects the performers, who all come from diaspora countries (Madagascar, Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe), to live music by Joël Rabesolo. Afterwards, choreographer Johanna Heusser confronts the sport of wrestling, a sport that is deeply imbued with conservative, national and male values and questions its role in a contemporary context. There will also be a contemporary exploration of flamenco with the dancer La Chachi and the singer Lola Dolores. Following this, the duo Sarah Baltzinger and Isaiah Wilson engage in extreme choreographic inventiveness to test the limits of human co-operation and a solidarity of bodies that creates new forms of hybrid motor skills. Magician and performer Tom Cassani, on the other hand, twists the tradition of magic tricks in a brilliant philosophical and choreographic exposé. Katerina Andreou is the mountain bike punk bomb of the festival with a quartet of dancers with definitely consuming energy (including Mélissa Guex and Baptiste Cazaux, two artists who are Associated Artists of Sévelin 36).
This year, the artists associated with Sévelin 36 will break new choreographic ground and find new fertile soil. In addition, the festival will be celebrated every Saturday evening: three evenings, each offering a different musical programme and a different theme. The evenings are open to everyone so that artists and audiences can inspire each other.
A colourful and engaging festival at Sévelin 36, the Lausanne hall dedicated entirely to contemporary dance, where the festival takes centre stage.
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