The partners of the D. Dance Alliance project, which is elevating the level of contemporary dance in the Danube region to new heights through innovative, modular and hybrid international co-productions, met in mid-November in Belgrade. The event was attended by Mateja Softić, co-founder and co-creator of Zavod Iskriva.

The Danube Dance Alliance uses the language of contemporary dance to tell stories of the past and brings new content into forgotten objects with the technology of the future. It takes contemporary dance out of traditional centres and connects it with architecture, cultural heritage, immersive technology and, above all, the community. In five dance performances that will take place in 2026 in Trbovlje, Velenje, Svetvinčenat, Belgrade and Sarajevo, creators from six Danube-region countries will invite audiences into an abandoned chimney, a disused swimming pool, a mine, a park and into nature, actively involving them in co-shaping the experience.

At this latest meeting, the partners reviewed the achievements of the past year and set the calendar of activities for 2026, which they also presented to the public at a press conference. Over the past year, the partners organised more than ten different dance and co-creative workshops in all five cities, held auditions and round-table discussions, and staged dance festivals that reached more than 5,000 visitors who collectively co-created the dance performances that will be presented next year.

Each choreography will be tailored to the community in which it is created, yet all five will be linked by a universal common thread. The choreographies are being created by outstanding choreographers from the participating countries: Nik Rajšek, Ognjen Vučinić, Maša Kolar, Aleksandar Ilić and Branko Mitrović. At the same time, a dance performance in a 360° environment has been completed; its filming was also finished in November and it was directed by the Slovenian director and dancer Enya Belak. Modern immersive technology will carry individual performances across countries, thereby creating a deeper understanding between cultures and contributing to greater accessibility of contemporary dance. The final productions will be shown next year in the aforementioned cities, while the 360° dance performance will visit an additional ten cities in the Danube region.

The project was initiated by the international dance platform Balkan DANCE Project in cooperation with our award-winning network New European Bauhaus on the Danube and is co-financed by the European Union under the Creative Europe programme. Zavod Iskriva participates in the project as a partner together with Delavski dom Trbovlje as the lead partner and the partners Festival Velenje, Kolektiv (Колективът), Zagrebački plesni ansambal, Institute for Artistic Dance and the Sarajevo War Theatre SARTR. The project is carried out in collaboration with the Živimo balet association from Sarajevo and associated partners: MOME Budapest, Europäische Donau-Akademie, Donaubüro, Ars Electronica and Stiftung HfG Ulm.