CLASH! International Festival. The Hybrid in Dance Models, between Classic and Contemporary, will be held from December  8 to 13, 2020. Starting at 6 pm CET (Bruxelles time), six events entirely dedicated to dance are going to be broadcast on the official website clashproject.eu every day. Screendance performances and talks will animate a unique online program created and produced by the six European partners involved in the project Clash! When Classic and Contemporary Dance Collide and New Forms Emerge – promoted by Balletto di Roma (Italy) and co-funded by Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The Festival will be presenting a shared calendar of events to show the results of practical investigations led during the European exchange by the project-partners from 2018.

Coordinated by Sapienza University of Rome (Italy), every day of CLASH! International Festival is curated by each partner-dance company ‒ Balletto di Roma (Italy), 420PEOPLE (Czech Republic), Companhia de Dança de Almada (Portugal), Derida Dance Center / Art Link Foundation (Bulgaria), Polski Teatr Tanca/ Polish Dance Theater (Poland) – and focus on a particular issue explored along with the initiative. Topics such as Audience Development, Dancer’s Training, Cultural Diplomacy in the Dance Field, and Choreographic-Making Processes are going to be displayed during the event programmed to allow the users to interact in creative dialogues with choreographers, dance pedagogues, and keynote speakers. Each day of the festival will end with a screendance performance created for the occasion by each partner.

Born before the pandemic, CLASH! International Festival had to face, during its realisation, the new complexity of the present: from the original idea of an itinerant event in the countries of the European exchange, the Festival has been transformed - in form but not in substance and spirit - with the inauguration of new digital spaces for discussion, exchange, study. An unexpected evolution that has discovered in the problem a new opportunity for a further step into new research areas. The “hybrid” nature of CLASH! International Festival, crossing live and digital instruments, as well as the dialogue among body and screen, is a way of looking at our time through dance using new virtual lenses to expand visions and perspectives.

In order to reflect together on the impact the pandemic has had on the performance field, the last day of the festival will be dedicated to the exchange of views on the role digitalisation can play to preserve the actualization of dance activities, and on the funding opportunities European programs will provide to sustain dance practitioners in the near future. Finally, the videodance work created by the Sapienza University of Rome team will be streamed, on the hybrid creative processes the partners performed to adapt their analogical practice into digital artefacts.