The Anniversary season of the International Ballet Festival DANCE OPEN XXV will be held in April.

The XXV Anniversary season of the International Ballet Festival Dance Open will be held from April 4 to 17 with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives and the Committee for Culture of St. Petersburg. The hospitable historical stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater will once again become the center of attraction for aesthetes. The festival does not limit itself to genres, bringing classical ballet productions, modern contemporary programs, avant-garde, national dances, and ballet/hip-hop/acrobatics fusion.

The XXV season program will feature 10 global dance brands, more than 350 artists, including from France, Italy, Spain and other European countries. The festival preserves a lively dialogue between companies, countries, and choreographic schools, proving that art knows no borders. The audience is waiting for 5 Russian premieres and 1 St. Petersburg premiere, awarded the Grand Prix of the Moscow Art Prize. The jubilee year's festival novel is filled with high-quality drama, strong characters, sharp conflicts and blessed pauses.

The festival will open on April 4: the Russian premiere of a dance detective story will take place on the historical stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater, immersing the viewer in the most difficult conditions of moral choice. The new production of one of the strongest Hungarian Inversedance companies, Ten Little Sins, is inspired by the classic novel by Agatha Christie, but its essence is not in detective intrigue, but in the knowledge of the nature of guilt.
The program of touring performances will continue on April 7 with the St. Petersburg premiere of the play "The Wedding." Ballet Moscow presented the production in 2024 and timed it to coincide with the 101st anniversary of the creation of the original source for Les Ballets Russes. Despite this, the play offers a new independent and conceptually structured reading of Stravinsky's role. The author of the music, Nikolai Popov, created a three-part composition: he placed the original thirty-minute piece between the prologue and the epilogue. This creates a funnel effect: the music draws in the viewer, preventing them from emerging.
The Hodila Izba folklore ensemble plays a special role in the performance: ancient chants, tremulous half-sounds, half-sighs, conspiracies and authentic wind instruments form a living, breathing musical space where the voice precedes the song, and the sound becomes a bodily experience.

Choreographer Pavel Glukhov also offered his own interpretation of the play. If the original concept of "The Wedding" focuses on the folk wedding ceremony, then in this version the dramaturgy of A.N. Ostrovsky's play "The Thunderstorm" is organically interwoven into the narrative. At the center of the production is the conflict between the rigid system of age–old traditions and the world of personal human feelings. Glukhov sees behind the ritualism of the "Wedding" not only a ritual, but also an archaic house-building system in which a woman turns out to be a victim, going from expectation to submission, from hope to self—loss.

On April 9th, Dance Open enters the space of ironic philosophy and paradoxical tenderness. For the first time in Russia, the French company Käfig and its founder Murad Merzuki will present the play Beauséjour, one of the most discussed premieres of 2024. Murad Merzuka's productions for his troupe invariably grow into a multi-layered spectacle, where hip-hop enters into a subtle and daring dialogue with circus, martial arts, video art and live sound. From this fusion, scenic worlds saturated with energy and poetic imagery are born.

The Vertigo program, which the National Dance Company of Mexico will present on April 11 at the Alexandrinsky Theater, is the Russian debut of one of the strongest troupes in Latin America, an exceptional event fully worthy of the anniversary season. A team of the highest professional level is coming to St. Petersburg with a program of four one-act ballets by leading choreographers of our time. This is a rare opportunity to see in one evening how modern choreography speaks differently about inner tension, memory, roots and hope - and how these different voices form a complete statement about a person.

The program opens with Sonya Jimenez's "Vertigo", a nine—minute ballet short as a flash about the state of extreme tension before jumping into the unknown. The heroine freezes at a point where the instinct of self-preservation still holds the body, but the emotions are already ready to take flight. The music of Arturo Marquez gives explosive force to this confrontation, turning the internal struggle into an almost physically tangible conflict.

On April 14 and 15, the festival will continue the story of national dances, but from mysterious China the audience will get to sensual Spain. Antonio Naharro, the heir to the great tradition of Spanish dance and at the same time its reformer, will show with his troupe what dance means to him. The star—studded Dance Open Gala, which will take place on April 17 at the Alexandrinsky Theater, is the final chapter of the festival novel, where all the storylines converge. As it happens with a good book: we turn the last page and realize that we have changed, filled up, grown up, lived a small life.

The main evening of the festival is a unique opportunity to witness a cross–section of an era, to see an incredibly vibrant and diverse dance palette, to experience how classical school unites with modernity, how folklore dissolves into abstraction, and how minimalism boldly speaks of the eternal.