Pre-note Moving in November 2026
Programme release September 16th
Dear artists and audience, dear friends and colleagues,
This year, Moving in November should have opened with When I Saw the Sea by Ali Charour. It should have closed with U. (un canto) by Alessandro Sciarroni, and it should have included works by Vânia Doutel Vaz and Mette Edvardsen with Chris Brokow.
But these artists and their works will remain absent from the programme, though I would have loved to present them to you. Due to the festival’s precarious financial situation and the lack of funding, we have been unable to realize the programme I envisioned for the festival’s 40th anniversary.
While letting go of these works in early May—drastically reducing the international programme and rethinking the festival’s logic and dramaturgy—the support of the Finnish Cultural Foundation’s Uusimaa Regional Fund made it possible to invite more artists living and working in Helsinki than originally foreseen, while also strengthening our support for those who had already been included.
In many ways, a paradox, leaving me with a tension and many questions I still have not been able to resolve. Letting go while bringing in new works. Crying while laughing. Celebrating and mourning at the very same time.
What does it mean when discussions drift away from conversations about art and artistic content, and instead circle constantly around missing financial resources, funding cuts, and grant applications?
What happens to discourse and reflection?
What happens to curatorial practice when we can invite works only from countries that continue to support the international circulation of performing arts?
What kind of performing arts ecology emerges when artistic choices are increasingly determined by the geographies of funding rather than by curatorial thinking?
And what does this mean for our ability to imagine, shape, and sustain programmes guided by artistic and curatorial intention rather than financial necessity?
When we publish the festival programme 16th of September, you will not be looking at a compromise. Nor will you be looking at the programme I originally imagined. Instead, you will encounter what remained of that original version, alongside new additions that, over the past months, I have come to know, embrace, and enjoy fully.
2026 marks 40 years of Moving in November. At this moment, it does not feel right to celebrate this anniversary. Instead, we have decided to postpone the anniversary celebration and, together with artists and their practices, reflect on what celebrations mean, what they represent, and what happens when celebrations fail, become awkward, feel clumsy, fall flat, or are simply called off.
Imagine the birthday cake is rotten or has fallen apart, and the candles have burned down before anyone could blow them out.
Friday the 13th of November will be dedicated to these reflections. This day will be a surprise, that we reveal later on.
With whom, and for whom, would we celebrate this anniversary?
After all, I see every edition of the festival as a celebration: of artists and their works, but also of the continued existence of an international contemporary dance festival in Helsinki, and of all the hands that have carried it through these 40 years.
For now, we celebrate the artists and the works that make Moving in November what it has always been: a place for encounters, curiosity, thought, laughter, learning, emotion, and exchange.
Looking at this year’s programme, I realize that it is a programme shaped by relations—even the solo works are not truly solos. They all ask, in different ways: What happens between us? What happens when we encounter another body? And that other body may take many forms—it is not only human.
I am much looking forward to seeing you in November: to the performances, to the Soup Talks and the Audience Club.
Yours,
Kerstin Schroth