Dance Umbrella, London’s annual international dance festival in October, is also online
Dance Umbrella, London’s annual international dance festival, runs from 2 – 31 October 2025, not just at various theatres and sites in London, but also online.
“This year’s Festival brings together a vibrant mix of perspectives that highlight just how connected our lived experiences really are,” said its Artistic Director, Freddie Opoku-Addaie. “Artists, creatives, and their wider communities help join the dots in an increasingly divided world, creating space for us to tune into the humanity within ourselves and in others. Seeing and feeling the power of that interconnectedness across London and beyond, is what keeps us going.”
To open up the Festival to more people, and to make it easier to explore more of the programme, there will be a limited number of £10 tickets available at every show.
The online Digital Pass is ‘Pay What You Can’ and will give viewers access to the entire digital programme within this year’s festival, available internationally from 2 October until 30 November. This will include a filmed version of Tjimur Dance Company’s bulabulay mun?/how are you? which draws on the historic Mudan shipwreck incident of 1874 – a traumatic chapter in Taiwanese history, “to reflect on the relationship between human actions and their unforeseen consequences”. There is also a collection of short films from London International Screen Dance Festival, featuring a selection of some of the most inventive and curious short films from around the world.
Opening the festival at Sadler’s Wells East this year is BOGOTÁ (2 & 3 Oct).
Visceral, transgressive and magnetic, Andrea Peña & Artists’ UK debut production constructs a brutalist landscape out of choreography inspired by Colombia’s political and spiritual heritage.
With striking intensity, nine performers chronicle transformations between chaos and rebirth, incarnating the tensions of ever-unfolding and turbulent histories. This hybrid work employs the company’s trademark use of movement as a vehicle for storytelling, embarking on an esoteric journey through a universe charged with magical realism. It uncovers passageways to transcendence, honouring the rebellion of deviant bodies and paying tribute to resilience within the post-colonial era.
Change Tempo (8 & 9 Oct) heads to the Barbican in 2025 to introduce London audiences to two distinctive artists set to make their mark, while challenging expectations of dance.
This year’s dynamic pairing of artists are known for pushing the boundaries of their forms. In Siren Dance, Stockholm-based Australian artist and Cullberg dancer Lilian Steiner plays with seduction, illusion and shifting truths while Spanish flamenco dancer and actor María del Mar Suárez/La Chachi’s Random Taranto turns the everyday into something extraordinary.
Also at the Barbican this year is Gesualdo Passione (16 Oct), which blends a cappella singing with expressive movement. Choreographed by Amala Dianor, Les Arts Florissants‘ Gesualdo Passione is a modern creation inspired by 17th-century composer Carlo Gesualdo’s work, conducted by Paul Agnew.
This year sees a world premiere from collaborators Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira, showcasing their final work of the Repertório trilogy. Repertório N.1 will be at Porchester Hall.
Drawing on postcolonial, gender and race studies, the Repertório trilogy interrogates the mechanisms of brutality and attempts to dismantle them.
The festival will close with performances from Tjimur Dance Company and Elena Antoniou at The Place and Shoreditch Town Hall respectively. Tjimur is Taiwan’s premier dance company dedicated to exploring and expressing the identity of the indigenous Paiwan people and Cypriot performer Elena Antoniou uses her work to tease the edges of performance and provocation, resulting in a dance that dares to confront the politics of looking in her work LANDSCAPE.
The full programme can be consulted online.
Graham Spicer, aka ‘Gramilano’, is a writer, director and photographer based in Milan. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy. His articles have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the Danza in Italia column for Dancing Times magazine. Graham was the historical advisor on Codice Carla, the 2023 documentary on Italian ballerina Carla Fracci.
Graham also works as a dance photographer, and his photos have appeared in many books, theatre programmes, and magazines, including Dancing Times, Dance Spirit and Ballet2000, as well as all the major Italian newspapers.
He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.
