Never ALLone and Shiraz

Aerowaves Spring Forward Festival 2025

Festival provides a platform for some of Europe’s most vibrant and promising choreographers to show their work to performing arts professionals and local audiences.  Hosted by Artisti Associati, the 14th edition of Aerowaves’ festival will take place from the 23rd to the 26th of April 2025.

3 days of jam packed action

The programme is formed of the current year's Aerowaves Twenty artists, who are invited to stay for the whole weekend, so that conversations with programmers can evolve naturally.

Local audiences have the chance to discover a great variety of brand new dance artists, most of whom are performing in their city for the first time.

The Spring Forward Festival 2025 is part of the official programme of the European Capital of Culture 2025 Nova Gorica – Gorizia

Here you can find the link to book the free tickets.

• Matea Bilosnić Never ALLone

Croatia, The Twenty25

What came before me? What remains after the performance? What will remain after I am gone?

A choreographic journey or a scenic shipwreck, Never ALLone represents a symbolic collision between fragile humanity and inorganic machinery. Through exploratory yet humorous melancholy, Matea Bilosnić builds a hybrid environment in which she questions personal trauma, proposes philosophical landscapes, experiments with shipwreck imagery and communicates with a machine entity. In the seven-chapter choreography she reshapes her past and re-examines our collective future.

Choreography: Matea Bilosnić
Performers: Matea Bilosnić, Nataša Kustura
Dramaturgy: Nikolina Rafaj
Music: Nikola Krgović N/OBE, Matea Bilosnić meteo
Stage design and visual identity: Josip Kresović
Costume design: Ana Fucijaš
Lighting design: Saša Fistrić
Robot design and construction: Vedran Relja
Photo: Neven Petrović

Production: Zadar Dance Ensemble (ZdPA)

With the support of: Croatian Institute for Movement and Dance (HIPP) through Dance Week Festival (TSP) & Zagreb Dance Centre (ZPC) & Mediterranean Dance Center (MPC) Financially supported by: Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, the City Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb and the Kultura nova Foundation.

Biography

Matea Bilosnić is a Croatian choreographer, dancer, performer, and a multimedia artist. In her work she explores the connection between actions, words and meaning in a multidisciplinary context. She graduated from Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance and is a member of the Zadar Dance Ensemble. She is a part of the production team and co-curates the Monoplay festival of contemporary dance in Zadar, Croatia. As a performer she has collaborated with various choreographers and since 2019 she has created more than ten works in collaboration with Zagreb Dance Company, TRAS Collective, Zadar Dance Ensemble. With Zadar Dance Ensemble, she created ‘Gozd-danse macabre’, for which she was awarded the Croatian Theatre Gild in the category: Best Choreography in 2020. She is a teaching assistant at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb where she teaches stage movement. Besides dance, theatre and pedagogy she is interested in music and video production.

• Armin Hokmi Shiraz

Germany

How do you pay tribute to ten years of artistic work and creativity brought to a halt? Is there a way to revive a festival through a dance performance? Armin Hokmi and the team answer these questions with intelligence and flair in ‘Shiraz’. It is almost like watching a sunrise or sunset: over and over again, this mysterious, captivating work reveals further nuances for the viewer to appreciate.

Six performers weave a pattern of movements, coiling and uncoiling to the pulsating beat of a captivating soundtrack, tracing fluid trajectories that bring them together in ephemeral constellations. With an unwavering affinity for the impulses arising between the dancers, "Shiraz" brings to the forefront the collective work of remembering and dancing together. A practice of love.

The point of departure for this work was an inquiry into the Shiraz Arts Festival. A historic event which took place between 1967 to 1977 in the south of Iran. The particular interest in this historic event lay in how the festival constituted a meeting place for performing arts from different genealogies, and aimed to transcend reductive modalities in regard to framing, presentation and orientation of artists and art works. "Shiraz" transposes this historic event to our contemporary times in the form of a revival, a tribute and a fictitious arena.

Concept and Choreography: Armin Hokmi
Dance and Performance: Daniel Sarr, Luisa Fernanda Alfonso, Aleksandra Petrusevska, Efthimios Moschopoulos, Johanna Ryynänen, Emmi Venna, Charlott Madeleine Utzig, In alternation with Xenia Koghilaki
Music: EHSXN, Reza R
Scenography and lights: Felipe Osorio Guzmán, Vito Walter
In conversation with: Emmi Venna
Costumes: Moriah Askenaizer
Consultation and archival study of the Shiraz Arts Festival (1966-1977): Vali Mahlouji

Co-production: Festival Montpellier Danse 2024, Rosendal Teater (Trondheim), Dansehallerne (Copenhagen), Black Box teater (Oslo), Tanzfabrik (Berlin)
Supported by: Arts Council Norway, Nordic Culture Fund, FFUK, Nordic Culture Point, The Finnish Cultural Foundation
Research period supported by: Dis-Tanzen
Residency support: Montpellier Danse, Tanzfabrik (Berlin), Lake Studios (Berlin), Uferstudios (Berlin), DAVVI Center for Performing Arts Hammerfest
Thank you to: Anne-Cécile Sibué, Rasmus Jensen, Diletta Sperman, Ellen Söderhult, Theatre Haus Berlin

Biography

Armin Hokmi  works with dance and choreography. He began in 2009 as a performer  in the independent theater scene in Iran and later continued to work and study abroad  in multiple performative practices and mediums. He holds a B.A. in acting from Norwegian Theatre Academy and has received his M.A. in Solo/Dance/Authorship at HZT Berlin. Armin is an associate artist at Montpellier Danse 2024-2026. As a dancer and performer he has worked with artists such as Mette Ingvartsen, Kasper Ravnhøj, Hooman Sharifi and Phillip Zarrilli, among others.

Armin’s dance and movement language is an interplay between a sense of familiarity with known forms, and practices that elude recognition, cultivating a horizon where different  references converge and contrast .  Captivated by dances that have been neglected and deemed unworthy of historical significance,his choreographic practice  navigates through time and space, changing through a constant unfolding of the dance into new trajectories.