Since 2021, co-artistic directors and life partners Brogan Davison and Pétur Ármannsson have been leading Reykjavik Dance Festival with a mission to make dance accessible. As Brogan puts it, they’re constantly asking: “How can dance be for everyone, not just those who have trained as dancers? Who is our audience? Where do we dance? Who do we dance with?”
“A big focus of the festival for the past decade has been really questioning who gets represented within the cultural life here on this island,” says Pétur. “Historically and also today, it’s a very homogenous group of people — often white, able-bodied, straight, a rather educated, elitist group, maybe also from certain area codes of Reykjavík, and not the countryside. It’s a very small group that does not reflect the diversity that exists in Iceland.”
Photo by Owen Fiene
Expanding what dance can be
By curating a wide-ranging programme that includes both local and international artists, the festival works to open that circle. “We try to bring something that has an impact,” says Pétur, and Brogan notes that the programme isn’t just about inclusion for its own sake — it reflects the conversations already happening in the scene, such as “the discourse of the politics of the body and the politics of dance and space.”
This year’s edition takes on the theme of “labour of love” and, in particular, honours “the pioneering women that paved the way with their labour of love,” without whom dance in Iceland wouldn’t have flourished. “bell hooks defines love as ‘something that you do,’” Pétur explains. “It’s not just something that you feel. You have to be dedicated to practise love, and very similar to dance, that’s something that you might think is soft or just lovely. [But] It demands rigorous training from a young age often, where people put their body on the line.”
Reykjavík Dance Festival opens with Forme(s) de vie by the French dance company Shonen that brings together three dancers and two people with mobility disabilities — a former boxer and a former ballerina — for what Pétur describes as a “dance practice of augmented dance, where they help them move in togetherness. It’s a really beautiful work.”
The other highlight of the opening night is Iceland Dance Company’s highly acclaimed, multilayered show The Orphic Circles and Other Gossip, which won Show of the Year at the 2025 Gríman Awards.
Then there are two performances by Ukraine-born, French-based choreographer Olga Dukhovna. Swan Lake Solo is a political reinterpretation of the classic ballet. “It’s the ballet that they play on Russian television during times of crisis,” says Pétur. “Olga was supposed to be choreographing a big ballet with a lot of dancers when the Russian invasion into Ukraine happened.” Instead of working with the full ensemble, Olga performs Swan Lake solo. She will also present Hopak, which preserves Ukrainian folk dances that are at risk of disappearing due to the war. Olga explores how these dances might look today if not for centuries of “forced cultural assimilation, territorial expansion, repression, and linguistic oppression.”
In Waiting for the elves, described as a “nod to Godot,” Palestinian-Lebanese poet and writer Mazen Maarouf invites the audience to his home. Collaborating with Norwegian choreographer Helle Siljeholm, he’ll be sharing stories about his time in Iceland and the elf rock in his backyard, which locals feel a strong connection to.
Then there’ll be the body symphonic, a performance-concert piece by a Lebanese dance maker Charlie Khalil Prince, where as Pétur puts it, “he explores his history and relationship to Lebanon in times of unrest.” He’ll be joined on the stage at ÍÐNÓ by virtuoso percussionist Joss Turnbull.
Rising stars and baby ravers
Iceland Dance Company is also presenting Flóðreka, born from Jónsi’s large-scale exhibition FLÓÐ at the Reykjavík Art Museum last year. “What we did last year was like an experiment, a kind of tryout,” explains choreographer Aðalheiður Halldórsdóttir.
For the festival, Aðalheiður collaborated with Jónsi to expand the trial version into an almost hour-long show, shaped around human experience of nature. “We have a lot more music from him, and the programming of the lights that follow is guided by the music. I’m creating a piece inside of that world, together with the light and his score,” shares Aðalheiður.
This time, Flóðreka moves from Hafnarhús to Borgarleikhúsið, where the traditional seating has been removed, allowing the audience to sit on both sides of the stage, divided by “a river of light.” The show features a 14-channel soundscape, a scent by Fischersund, and, in Aðalheiður’s words, “eight gorgeous dancers.”
But not all festival works come from established artists. One of the programme highlights is a double bill of graduation shows, DIE TRYING and zero tolerance, by recent graduates of the Contemporary Dance Practices programme at Iceland University of the Arts: performer and dance artist Bertine Bertelsen Fadnes, who works between Oslo and Reykjavík, and Finnish dancer Leevi Mettinen.
DIE TRYING is a piece for five dancers, choreographed by Bertine. “My piece mostly revolves around kind of like uncertainty or unresolvedness,” she explains. “It’s very obsessed with the ideas of beginnings and ends and also just everything in between and before and after them, and also about, kind of like fictions and memories and transients, like the idea of things disappearing and breaking down. It’s just kind of a big mind map.”
Photo by Stefanía Jóhönnudóttir
In zero tolerance, made for three dancers, including Leevi himself, the focus shifts to fear. “It’s mostly about fear — fear in community, fear in individuals, and fear towards something abstract that is hard to describe, hard to put form, but it’s still very real, and also fear towards something very concrete, in my case, for example, state violence, authorities, and this unquestioned power they hold,” he explains.
Bertine and Leevi agree that the two pieces ask a lot from the artist, both physically and emotionally. “They ask you to really commit yourself to them,” says Bertine. “They’re quite, how do you say, large in an energetic scale, or like… yeah, intense is a good word.”
The festival also makes space for its tiniest dancers with its now-staple Baby Rave. Happening at Dansverkstæðið, the event is free for children of all ages, accompanied by adults — “they can be whomever — mom and dad, siblings, grandparents, auntie and uncle, whatever,” Pétur explains. “We really try to take the ethics of rave culture and bring it to children in a safe, friendly, and really fun way.”
To feel human, dance
For Brogan and Pétur, it’s crucial that Iceland, despite its geographic location, doesn’t isolate itself from the rest of the world, especially in times of global crises. Reykjavík Dance Festival, they say, can help us feel “as belonging to a larger society, a larger context.”
“We hear so much on the news, we are constantly connected to our phones, and at some point the news that we receive just becomes absurd or something so distant that we’re unable to empathise,” says Pétur. “Performing arts, and dance in particular, as the art form of the body, is the antidote to this numbness that this constant onlining produces.”
Brogan adds, “The nice thing about dance is you don’t need to necessarily understand Icelandic to come and enjoy a dance performance.”
“I don’t think you need to understand anything,” Pétur chimes in. “Dance is fun. You do it. Every society in history has danced. It’s a primal expression. It’s not something you do necessarily to create art, it’s something you do to feel human.”
Reykjavík Dance Festival runs from November 12 to 16. Full programme available at reykjavikdancefestival.com
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