Festival director Christian Watty introduces the program 2026 !

Dear audience,

What does home mean to you? A place? A language? A landscape? The scent of childhood? A familiar melody? Or the people with whom we feel at home?

Few concepts seem so self-evident, yet resist any clear-cut definition. For some, home is a place; for others, a memory, a feeling, or something that is never finally fixed.

The productions invited to this year’s festival open up different perspectives on what home can mean today.

With a focus on Québec, euro-scene Leipzig 2026 turns its attention to one of the world’s most fascinating dance scenes, a source of vital artistic impulses for many years. At the same time, an exceptional artistic ecosystem has developed there, in which ideas and ways of working are passed on and art is given the freedom to reinvent itself time and again.

Marie Chouinard is one of the great innovators of contemporary dance. With her two masterpieces MAGNIFICAT and HENRI MICHAUX: MOUVEMENTS, she can now be experienced at euro-scene Leipzig for the first time. For more than four decades, few other choreographers have combined such radical curiosity with an equally distinctive and poetic visual language.

Alongside her, Manuel Roque, Alexandra ‘Spicey’ Landé, Crazy Smooth and Athena Lucie Assamba represent a younger generation of outstanding artistic voices who are making a lasting impact on Québec’s dance scene.

What remains of home after flight and displacement? Returning does not necessarily mean coming home. THE CHILD by Iranian director Afsaneh Mahian, EXERCISES FOR A POSSIBLE RETURN by the Syrian exile theatre group Collective Ma’louba and CAMPOBELLO by Swiss director Eva-Maria Bertschy tell of people seeking safety, contemplating return or trying to build a new life far from home. The focus is not on geopolitical conflicts or political debates, but on the people who experience their consequences directly.

Relationships and community can offer stability and a sense of belonging. SWEET RODEO and 2PAR2 make closeness and distance, trust and conflict visible. IN MY BODY and NKUL NNAM each create spaces of encounter in their own way: through a dance culture that connects generations, and through the village as a symbol of a shared sense of belonging in which tradition and the present come together. Moving between Korea and Europe, Jaha Koo – recently awarded the 2026 International Ibsen Award – searches in HARIBO KIMCHI for his place between two cultures, while British rising star Liam Francis asks in DUAL TILL THE DEATH and A BODY OF RUMOURS how the way others see us, and the way we see ourselves, shape identity.

For many people, hip-hop, breaking, Afro house and waacking are far more than dance. The street and club cultures from which they emerged have created communities that often become a second family. At the same time, they have transformed contemporary dance in recent years. What began in streets, public spaces and clubs has long since conquered theatre stages. This development is reflected in our programme more clearly than ever before: in six productions, three of them on the Main Stage of Schauspiel Leipzig.

And what if the familiar suddenly turns out to be something other than it seems? HAPPY LOOKING FOR FREEDOM by Lydia Ziemke begins as a nostalgic reunion with a television hero of the 1980s and develops into a comic yet incisive assessment of our present. For the remarkable ensemble of tanzmainz, Moritz Ostruschnjak has choreographed TRAILER PARK, confronting us with a world in which digital images and social media increasingly shape our everyday lives. And finally, on Saturday afternoon, Compagnie Beau Geste transforms Leipzig’s Market Square into a place of poetry with TRANSPORTS EXCEPTIONNELS – and an excavator into a dance partner.

Perhaps home is not a place we find, but something we create together.

We look forward to sharing these six festival days with you and with artists from around the world.

A warm welcome to euro-scene Leipzig 2026. Let the curtain rise!

Christian Watty +
the euro-scene Leipzig team