FEST EN FEST 2026 presents expanded choreography as a field that moves beyond the dancing body into sound, text, publishing, objects, installation, labour, intimacy and collective action. Curated by H2DANCE, this year’s programme brings together UK and Nordic artists whose works treat choreography as something that can be read, listened to, touched, looped, built, dismantled and shared.

Across performances, installations, conversations and books, artists explore how movement circulates through civic space, memory, language and material relations. Choreography is sparked by text, as vibration felt through sound, as flirtation and reciprocal gaze, as labouring bodies negotiating collaboration and failure, and as objects that resist, partner or overwhelm the human performer. Practices of repetition, looping and insistence blur beginnings and endings, foregrounding collective authorship and attention over individual virtuosity.

The festival engages questions of proximity, desire, queerness, access and care, asking how bodies—human and non-human—coexist, collide and remember together. Writing is performed aloud, sound is felt as much as heard, archives are reimagined through tactility and grief, and instruments, tools and materials are queered through use. Rather than presenting choreography as a fixed form, Fest en Fest proposes it as an evolving set of relations: between bodies and objects, sound and space, effort and pleasure, imagination and action.