One evening, two worlds: Dance x 2 by Dance Theater Heidelberg

Zwinger 1, Heidelberg
November 18, 2025

As the title suggests, Dance Theatre Heidelberg’s Dance x 2 programme features two works by two choreographers. Seen at Zwinger 1, Theater Heidelberg’s smaller black-box venue, it was an evening of two very different movement vocabularies too.

In 2020, Belgian choreographer Astrid Boons developed Crash, which thanks to the pandemic, was only seen as part of an online triple-bill. Now, as Crash: reassembled, she finally gets the chance to present it live. Except, as was explained in the post-show discussion, it’s not so much reassembled as redeveloped, the 2025 version being significantly different from the first iteration with much new material that came out of improvisations by the new cast.

Boons muses on what the future might hold for human movement. How will the people of tomorrow behave thanks to technological change? We already frequently hear comments about how many are seemingly welded to their mobile phones but will our gaze be anything other than even more downwards, she wonders.

That impacts personal interaction and contact. Will we still be able to deal with each other face-to-face. We have already seen the signs. An oft-cited side-effect of Covid and the massive increase in digital communication at the time, is that people, youngsters in particular, forgot how to deal with each other in person. That skill had to be relearned.

Crash: reassembled presents a strange, somewhat unsettling picture of the future. Boons presents her dancers in deep teal, close-fitting bodysuits. Miguelángel Clerc Parada’s slightly echoing, grumbling soundscape comes with what sounds like a wind behind.

Although there are occasional responses to each other, and the very occasional contact between individuals, the dancers appear disconnected from each other. There is an edginess, an awkwardness, to everything. The beings on stage are undoubtedly human, yet appear not to be fully the humans we know.

They also seem to be afflicted by sensory overload. Limbs stretch, flex and struggle. Everything looks awkward, at times animalistic. There’s a distinct suggestion that the humans they were is still buried deep inside, not least in the way a couple of relationship briefly develop, but that they are struggling to regain or release what was.

Returning to phones, the use of hands, or rather the non-use and positions they are held in at times, does indeed suggest at least partial loss of utility.

It is a difficult watch, yet one not without its intrigue. I suspect it might reveal more on a second viewing. But, if this is the future, I’m fearful.

IT’S NIGHT AGAIN, a new work by Italian choreographer duo Panzetti/Ticconi (Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi) is somewhat easier on the eye, although it too takes us to another sphere, this time that of the unconscious, of night, sleep, and dreams good and bad.

The five dancers, moving slowly in the dim light, initially appear happily asleep. But, why, one asks, do they all have babies dummies in their mouths. They also all wear numbers, football-style, on their backs and pants: 8, 10, 23, 69, and more oddly, 777. That sport connection returns to haunt the viewing time and again, not helped by aspects of the choreography and what sounds like crowds cheering and whistles blowing in Demetrio Castellucci’s soundscape..

Dreams of all descriptions have a habit of leaping around. Events, places, meanings all shift in an instant. Things become divorced from reality, completely abstracted even. No wonder they are so difficult to decipher. And that’s always assuming we can remember them even remotely clearly in the first place.

And in IT’S NIGHT AGAIN, things do change in a second. A dancer falls and is ‘rescued’ by another, only for a hand to go to her throat. Innocent play and violence become close bedfellows. A ball throwing motif is repeated time and again. How it develops is not remotely scary to watch but, from being innocent, suddenly we find others taking cover, cowering from what now seems to be an onslaught. Are they even balls or perhaps something altogether more sinister?

Ditto euphoria and despair. I come back to football, a game of incredible highs and awful lows where dreams and nightmares do co-exist. Trust me, as a long-suffering supporter of a lower-league club, the highs are stratospheric, but there have been a lot more nightmare lows! In IT’S NIGHT AGAIN, what looks like the slow-motion joy of winning or scoring a goal is turned on its head in an instant. VAR anyone?

Best comes towards the end. Bows, classical ballet-style, slowly take on an altogether different hue, turning into a drill, and then running, running, as if fleeing. As artificial blood seeps from mouths, some fall or lag behind but are helped up or encouraged. And then we wake up. As we always do. But we also remember.