PHOTOS What Next Dance Festival 2026 brings national and international dance performances to Limerick

What Next Dance Festival 2026 brings national and international dance performances to Limerick City. Photo: Jonas Bilberg

What Next Dance Festival 2026 brings fresh and exciting national and international dance performances to Limerick city from February 9 – 14

WHAT NEXT Dance Festival returns to Limerick for the ninth consecutive year. This year’s edition features dance makers from across the country and internationally, who will bring fresh and vibrant perspectives to audiences in Limerick city, in a six-day celebration of dance and live performance.

This specially curated programme showcases dance artists and choreographers at various stages of their careers, whose work reflects the urgency, tenderness and imagination shaping dance today.

Organiser’s say, “This year’s performances ask what it means to make dance in precarious times, how we carry what is fragile, and how we might create meaning, connection and legacy even when the future feels uncertain. In a time that tests our capacity for attention and care, our dance artists show us how to cultivate these very qualities. Their dance allows us to pause, to feel, and to stay in relationship with one another, with openness and possibility.”

advertisement
advertisement

advertisement
advertisement

advertisement
advertisement

advertisement
advertisement

Festival curators Catherine Young and Mary Wycherley are delighted to welcome audiences to Limerick to Dive in and Discover Dance. They said, “We are grateful to our audiences, artists, crews, funders, volunteers and supporters for coming together again to bring the people of Limerick this wonderful opportunity to gather and experience the transformative power of dance. We come together as a community to look at the pressing issues of our time, trusting dancing as a form of wisdom that carries us toward shared worlds and thriving futures.”

Starting from Thursday, February 12, Dance Limerick’s Performance Space at St. John’s Church will one more year be the stage of three mixed-bill nights featuring a total of eight performances by exceptional national and international dance artists who are shaping the world of dance today.

Opening night will feature a double bill where audiences will be treated to the sensuous world of babes, by Aerowaves Twenty25 artist gergő d. farkas as well as Dance Limerick Associate Artist for 2026 Magdalena Hylak, who will perform a duet with fellow dance artist Roberta Ceginskaite, to live music by composer Lionel Kasparian.

On Friday night, audiences will have the pleasure of seeing recent creations by three choreographers that have been gaining increased traction in the Irish scene. First, Alex Vostokova will perform a version of Pit, a piece exploring the social, psychological, and ecological effects of modern urbanism. This provocative work will be followed by Aoibhinn O’Dea’s Foot of the Lungs, where we are invited into a dialogical relationship between sound and movement. Finally, Salma Ataya’s Everynothing is both an act of resistance and a reflection on how we survive when everything and nothing happen at once.

Saturday night will close the festival with a powerful mix of national and international artists, including Mufutau Yusuf’s Proses on neither here nor there, a work that contemplates the fragility of human life, how we live and the legacy we shape; Matt Szczerek’s Shell, where him and Simone O’Toole navigate the difficulties and expectations we face in intimate relationships and finally, Aerowaves Twenty25 Artist Ekin Tunçeli’s heartquake uses the choreographer’s homeland in Turkey as a backdrop for the reflection on living on shaky ground, both metaphorically and literally.

Artists will gather at Dance Limerick at the start of the week for a three-day Creative Exchange, a central part of the festival that allows them to have fruitful discussions and interactions and gain invaluable insights into each other’s work.

New to the 2026 festival is the STUDIO WHAT NEXT where for the first time, viewers will get a sneak peek into works in development by three Irish-based makers, Alessandra Azeviche, Justine Cooper and Grace Cuny, followed by a chance to chat with the artists and learn more about their creative process.

This year, dance fills other spaces in the city. Limerick Dance Artists in Residence for 2025/26 the Parsley Collective will hold two intimate performances at the Limerick City Gallery of Art, inviting us into their explorative, improvisational world, where they seek to draw attention to immaterial and invisible realms. Laura Murphy on the other hand, brings her surprising, electric participatory performance The Shake to St. John’s Pavillion, where everyone regardless of age, experience and ability will be able to step into the dance floor and connect to their body in a celebratory dance.