The reviews are in!

We are thrilled to share with you three reviews on the festival published by Springback Magazine and C-Print, which reveal the diversity  and the plurality of approaches at stake in the 5th edition of STHLM DANS. Enjoy the read!

• ‘STHLM DANS 2026: the fractured body of dance’ by Anna Kozonina published by Springback Magazine 

Staging stories and diversities at the fifth edition of the Stockholm dance festival Extract:

‘What emerges from STHLM DANS 2026 is a portrait of contemporary dance at a crossroads. It refuses to offer a unified thematic vision or a singular aesthetic. Instead, it presents a fractured mirror: here, queer desire is deconstructed through ready-made choreography and theatrical monologue; there, horror is used to explore bodily autonomy; elsewhere, dance becomes a tool for intimate storytelling within a museum. The festival’s true core, I believe, lies not in any single performance, but in the dialogue these disparate works create with each other and with the context of the city itself.

If we can no longer agree on a shared ‘general context’, STHLM DANS 2026 suggests that we might instead find common ground in the plurality of our journeys – in the personal, messy and contingent stories that individual artists bring to the stage. Whether this fragmentation is a symptom of a crisis or a condition of survival remains an open question. In any case, this festival is about forging connections – between people, genres, between the past and the future, and between the stage and the streets of Stockholm.’

Full review: https://springback.org/magazine/2026/07/sthlm-dans-2026-fractured-body-dance

• ‘Detail and difference at STHLM DANS’ by Zachary Whittenburg published by C-Print

Extract: ‘For a long time — possibly forever — dance theories and practices have surfaced and located tensions about detail and difference. Bodies moving together in unison, whether ballet corps or drill teams, have always presented observers with opportunities to compare people and identify outliers. Those who perform alone aren’t immune when the choreography is fixed. Any soloist might be compared, favorably or otherwise, to someone who interpreted the same role the night before or even decades earlier. Although many conversations about dance include mentions of “personal expression,” many individuals experience dance training as a project of their entrainment, whereby the spontaneous physical impulses of a child are channeled over time, through repetition and structure, toward containment within a technique.

During its recent, fifth iteration at venues in Stockholm and Botkyrka, STHLM DANS seemed to center and indeed celebrate that aspect.’

Full review: https://www.c-print.se/post/detail-and-difference-at-sthlm-dans

• ‘Bodies entangle histories: Baltic Take Over 2026’ by Kärt Koppel published by Springback Magazine

A small, itinerant platform of Baltic work enfolded into a Swedish dance festival. Extract:

‘Baltic Take Over’s 3rd edition arrived at STHLM Dans not as a loud declaration but as a compact insertion: a small Baltic platform folds into a larger Scandinavian dance festival. Sunny spring weather welcomes the audiences at Konträr, a small subscription-funded venue whose orange wardrobe-corridor leaves little room for anonymity. Familiar and unfamiliar faces linger there, smiling and exchanging small talk before the performances begin. Three days, three countries, three pieces, and all duets.
(…)
Politics reveal themselves not only in explicit subject matter, but in the conditions surrounding the works: the precarious state of cultural funding in both the Baltics and Sweden, the choice of venues, and the positioning of a small Baltic platform within the larger framework of STHLM Dans. Baltic Take Over never attempts to separate aesthetics from circumstance. Instead, it insists that bodies, institutions and histories remain permanently entangled.’

Full review: https://springback.org/magazine/2026/06/baltic-takeover-2026

Freddy Houndekindo in Becoming Tree. © Carlos Zaya