Nighttime wants to be celebrated collectively as a space for pleasure and delight, yet is also dangerous and bewildering. What do the night hours bring that temporarily suspends daily duties and rules? Choreographer Mette Ingvartsen, after The Dancing Public, continues her research into historical dancing manias and is a guest of the festival for the first time with this new performance.

Nine performers indulge in a delirious night of dance and music, inspired by the anonymous freedom of masked balls, strange carnivals, and derailed parties. Their bodies are propelled by contagious outbreaks of unstoppable dance and immersed in an ocean of uncontrollable sensations. Sometimes they fight the strong current, other times they surrender to the wild waves. Accompanied by live music from Will Guthrie, the dancers effortlessly navigate between hedonism and exorcism, joy and sadness, their bodies thriving in an intoxicating mood of togetherness. How can a state of de-control and excess drive the crowd to act?

Ingvartsen approaches bodily excesses as a reaction to exhaustion, stress, and emotional strain connected to a contemporary desire for transgression and transcendence. The result is an intense ode to the freedom the night brings.

"When Mette Ingvartsen takes something on, she wants to understand everything about it." – Mia Vaerman, 2023, the low countries

"Mette Ingvartsen’s energy is contagious, her dance from time to time hectic or more measured, mostly dismantling sexiness and gifting her body pure freedom." - Butterwort (about The Dancing Public), 2022, Butterwort