Dance First Think Later

Featured artists
Anan Atoyama ; Eve Chariatte ; danced stances—Aurélie Dupuis & Zoé Lefèvre + Juli Sando, lisa laurent, Marie Popall and Tyra Wigg ; Olga de Soto ; Aurélien Dougé ; Soraya Leila Emery ; Esther Ferrer ; Trajal Harrell / Zürich Dance Ensemble ; marce norbert hörler + Kari Leigh Rosenfeld ; Geumhyung Jeong ; Lenio Kaklea, Alexandra Maurer ; MOPS_DanceSyndrome ; Nefeli Papadimouli ; Vanessa Riera ; Katja Schenker ; Cindy van Acker + Videos by Cecilia Bangolea, Gabriela Löffel, and Angelica Mesiti, produced by the MIRE program and shown on screens in Léman Express train stations.

Curator: Olivier Kaeser 
Organisation and production: Arta Sperto

Dance First Think Later is an exhibition/festival exploring the intersections of dance, performance, visual arts and the moving image. The works presented in 2026 explore community and living together, gender and queer culture, migration, ecology, the relationship between the body, the city and the built environment, introspection and meditation, and the re-examination of cultural histories.

Among these projects, the collective danced stances (Aurélie Dupuis & Zoé Lefèvre) investigates the transforming PAV district and Greater Geneva through Choreopolice/Choréopolitics: Histories, Traces and Activations of a Politics of Movement in Greater Geneva, presented at Le Commun alongside a filmed essay and a live performance. Also at Le Commun, marce norbert hörler and Kari Leigh Rosenfeld explore architecture and the moving body through a video work based on an installation and performance created for the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. Eve Chariatte’s group Night Walk leads participants through the urban landscape of the PAV.

At Villa Bernasconi, Alexandra Maurer’s video installation centres on a street protest in Iran, combining choreography and animated painting to reconstruct gestures of bodily resistance. With Atlas des Souffles, Anan Atoyama explores climate change and migration through participatory dance and movement, bringing together participants in a version developed specifically for Geneva. Vanessa Riera’s fashion show-performance, conceived for the staircase of the Museum of Art and History (MAH), brings together young people with lived experience of migration and incorporates upcycled textiles. Also at the MAH, MOPS_DanceSyndrome, directed by Ela Francesca, presents dancers with Down syndrome and considers disability as a source of strength and creative richness.

Questions of gender and queer culture are explored by Soraya Leila Emery and Lenio Kaklea, while works by Aurélien Dougé, Olga de Soto, Geumhyung Jeong and Cindy Van Acker invite audiences towards inward-looking experiences akin to meditation. Cultural history is central to the works of Trajal Harrell, examining dance forms that emerged in 1960s New York, and Olga de Soto, who explores memories surrounding Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table.

The main gallery focuses on the idea of the “body in absentia”, bringing together works in which the body is fundamental but physically absent: Esther Ferrer’s Perfiles, Katja Schenker’s drawings and Nefeli Papadimouli’s suspended garment-sculptures. Since 2024, DFTL has also foregrounded artists’ creative processes through choreographic scores, notation systems, working notes and research documents. This documentary dimension continues through the symposium The Movement: From Score to Documentation which will bring together 14 speakers involved in research, publications, and programs dedicated to the processes of notation, collection, and storytelling in performance and dance.

Arta Sperto
Arta Sperto (Esperanto for “artistic experience”) is an independent curatorial platform dedicated to the curation, production, presentation and publication of multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary artistic projects. Without a permanent venue, it works across different locations and in partnership with cultural institutions and organisations.

Publication
Dance First Think Later—The Thinking Body between Dance and Visual Arts, Vol. 2, published by Arta Sperto and distributed by Les presses du réel, will be released to coincide with DFTL26. Dedicated to the 2022 Geneva edition, it includes extensive visual documentation and newly commissioned essays on the 14 artists, duos, and collectives featured in the program.