The first manifestion of If I Can’t Dance’s yearlong traveling performance programme takes place at Festival a/d Werf in Utrecht and functions as a prologue for the rest of the edition. If I Can’t Dance invited artists Johanna Billing, Matti Braun, Gerard Byrne, Mariana Castillo Deball, Yael Davids and LIGNA to develop a new work that will travel to Utrecht, Den Bosch and Leiden. Each of the artists has produced projects which fracture ideas of seamless reality and interrupt the way we read human activity in tightly bound frames. All of these projects in a variety of very different ways interrogate, utilize and celebrate human agency.

Johanna Billing creates a space somewhere between a musical performance, an intense moment of personal interpretation and collective celebration.

In his film 1984 and beyond Gerard Byrne thinks about shifting the time and location of a magazine interview about ‘the future’ into the format of film and using actors, architecture and costumes to approximate these changes.

Matti Braun asks ordinary people to inhabit a theatre piece as he himself borrows elements from visual art, choreography and music to bring the story of The Alien to life.

Mariana Castillo Deball questions how we understand the construction or framing of the individual in terms of time and history.

Yael Davids focuses on the body and the voice as the conduits of human expression and subverts the idea of theatrical space to frame this exploration.

And finally radio group Ligna developed a new chorography and radio piece, which must be enacted and performed by the audience itself.