PHOTOS What Next Dance Festival inspires audiences in its 8th edition

Dance Limerick bring the 2025 What Next Dance Festival to Limerick, now celebrating its 8th anniversary

The 2025 What Next Dance Festival brings conversations, workshops, and dance through a curated selection of fresh and inspiring works from Monday, February 10 to Saturday, February 15

Dance Limerick is delighted to bring the eighth edition of What Next Dance Festival, a special opportunity to invite the public to experience a curated selection of fresh and inspiring works highlighting the many voices shaping dance today.

The festival brings together performers from across Ireland and internationally over six days of discovery and celebration. Through performances, talks and workshops, this year’s programme offers us perspectives on relationships, resistance, liberation, society and how we want to be together in our communities. What Next is a special space for exploration and conversation, an opportunity to gather and meet the joy, curiosities and pleasure of dance and dancing together.

With Dance Limerick saying, “Get ready to be inspired, challenged and involved in What Next 2025!”

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Festival highlights include The Body Symphonic on Thursday, February 13, bringing a solo performance-concert by Aerowaves Twenty25 artist Charlie Khalil Prince that observes the body as a site of resistance to the Dance Limerick Performance Space in John’s Square. Also on Thursday, The Weight is an immersive new dance work by Luca Truffarelli that reflects on freedom and subjection.  

Friday, February 14 Many Mes explores Rocío Domínguez’s experiences of transit, loss and rebirth. False Memories Aerowaves artist Tú Hoàng is created around the concept of the psychological mind through the perspective of two individuals that have an unspeakable connection with each other. In an abstract way, the feeling stays that they are one entity in their spiritual world, whether they are together or separated in physicality.

Saturday, February 15 The Parsley Collective return to What Next with their newest piece Un-One-Ing, where they “ride horses of intention. Through gaps in the land of thought. Through the hole in the middle of the word nOw. Expanding. Riding horses of intention. Un-One-Ing.”

Saturday also sees Missing You, Missing Me by Jessie Thompson is an intimate new work that looks at unique familial settings, guilt, grief and the consequences of these. Continuing on from Jessie’s recent work Crawler she continues to choreographically pull from many influences such as Hip Hop and contemporary, in collaboration with Alex Vostokova.  

In collaboration with the MA Contemporary Dance Performance students at the Irish World Academy, choreographer Amir Sabra, composer Rossa Ó Snodaigh and fellow members of the award-winning Irish band Kíla invite the audience to experience an intercultural dialogue in a charged and contested movement space in Bridging.

The Saturday also sees vibrant, upbeat world music Céilí dance, conceived by Catherine Young & The Welcoming Project, Cabu, which will feature dance styles from around the world including Palestinian Dabke dance, Afro-Brazilian and West African dance and Ukrainian folk dance, finishing off the evening with some of the traditional Irish Ceílí dances.

A full programme of events is available on the Dance Limerick website as the What Next Dance Festival in its eighth year continues to bring local, national, and international dance to Limerick City.

Pictures: Olena Oleksienko/ilovelimerick