For the second consecutive time, Holland Dance Festival offers a stage to one of the youngest dance companies in the Netherlands: Compagnie 21. As the first in the Netherlands, Compagnie 21 has succeeded in escaping "the niche of inclusive art" and claiming a place within mainstream theater offerings with its moving and stimulating performances - performed by dancers with and without disabilities.
What is freedom?
After the successful productions No Bodies and Jij en ik en alle anderen, Compagnie 21 presents Free Birds Fly in the nineteenth Holland Dance Festival, a performance that - according to its creator Jordy Dik - reflects man and society in all their colors and with all their whims and flaws. Together with nine performers, in Free Birds Fly he goes on an inner journey, in search of freedom; a theme that appears in an increasingly urgent way in Dik's choreographies. What exactly is freedom, he asks himself in this new production, and when do we experience freedom? Does freedom have to do with another or is freedom in ourselves? Dik: "Our free voice longs for the wind to carry it - beyond all eardrums - completely inside. Without the uncomfortable fear of not being understood or getting lost. We are all seeking light and silence, love and air. So we breathe in, leap and catch the wind with open wings."
Bigger than ourselves
Compagnie 21 is a professional, inclusive dance theater company that presents poetic, raw and human work. The hard core of the group consists of people with disabilities who have been trained for years at Theaterwerkplaats Tiuri. Compagnie 21 offers them the opportunity to show and flourish their unique and often unprecedented talent within the professional dance world in the Netherlands and abroad. The company regularly collaborates with guest dancers and musicians, each of whom also brings their own story. By bringing about true encounters, masks fall off and prejudices disappear and Compagnie 21's people become visible in all their diversity and colors. "In this way," the company propagates, "we as performers and as spectators get moving together. A movement that is bigger than ourselves."
