Reykjavík Dance Festival is about getting people together in shared situations that cast us, through dance, dancing and choreography. It gives priority to local and less local artists working with these artforms. Olga Dukhovnaya, Helle Siljeholm & Mazen Maarouf and Iceland Dance Company are among artists at this year’s festival.
This year’s Reykjavík Dance Festival carries the theme of love – or more specifically, the labour of love. The labour of love is not soft or fleeting. Much like the work of the dancer, it demands rigour, resistance, and care. It insists on passion over power, tolerance over divisiveness, and peace over war. It is a practice, a commitment, a daily act of persistence.
The history of dance in Iceland shows us how fragile joy can be under patriarchal and puritanical powers. In 1745, the “skemmtibann” — the festivities ban — sought to silence public dancing and erase it from daily life. But dance survived, living in domestic spaces, in whispered rhythms and shared steps, and in the folklore of elves and hidden people who danced long into the night. When dancing was forbidden for humans, it continued in imagination, refusing to disappear.
From these margins, dance was rebuilt. In the 19th and 20th centuries, pioneering women created the foundations of dance as an art form in Iceland. Their labour built the ground on which we stand today.
Reykjavík Dance Festival 2025 is dedicated to the history of dance: those who resisted erasure, who worked with passion and rigour to make space for joy and togetherness, and who transformed dance into a practice of survival as much as art.
The festival is about preserving joy, communality, and cultural memory, extending solidarity to dancers and communities across the world whose traditions are threatened by erasure — from Ukraine and Palestine to every place where joy, cultural history and life itself is under attack.
Reykjavík Dance Festival 2025 is not just a programme of performances. It is a gathering. A celebration of joy. A refusal to disappear. A collective insistence that dance matters, and that the labour of love is what makes it possible.Get ready for the Reykjavík Dance Festival from November 12-16. Find the schedule here.
