Joshua Monten

October 2023

This month, local Swiss fans can look forward to a special collaboration between the Joshua Monten Dance Company and the Bernese historical music ensemble Die Freitagsakademie. They’ll be presenting a radically reduced and reworked staging of Jean Philippe Rameau’s opera-ballet “Les Indes galantes” — one of the undisputed highlights of the French baroque.

Performances are planned from 26-28 October at the Tojo Theater in Bern. (Yes, an unusual location for baroque music, but also strangely fitting for the new staging.) A final performance is planned on 29 October at the TOBS Laboratoire Zwingli in Biel.

August 2023

August was no vacation time for us, but the rather the culmination of months of preparation. One team was putting the finishing touches on our new forest dance “Faking It” in Bern. Another team was performing “Romeo, Romeo, Romeo” at outdoor festivals in Belgium and France. A third team was on tour in Thailand, presenting “Kill Your Darlings” at street festivals and schools in three different cities. And a fourth was in South Africa, presenting “Game Theory” and “How to Do Things with Words” at the Cradle of Creativity Festival in Johannesburg and the JOMBA! Festival in Durban.

May 2023

Lately we’ve been dealing with the endless task of imposing straightness on an irregular world. More specifically, we’ve been working on our newest dance production, “Linearity.” Outfitted with safety helmets and bright adhesive tape, two dancing construction workers engage in an extended dialogue between straight lines and luxurious curves.

The premiere of  “Linearity” took place at the Tanzfest Bern on 12 May in front of a thousand school children — see links below.

December 2022

In the past two years our company has launched an initiative to bring more dance into Swiss schools. The company typically spends a half day at each school, first giving an on-site performance and then offering dance workshops for individual school classes. The workshops are a great way to introduce children to contemporary dance, to get them moving and to develop their own innate physical creativity.

In the cantons Bern, Zürich and Fribourg, these offers are fully funded through “culture gift certificates,” offered by the cantonal boards of education.

Currently three productions are available in Bern, two in Zürich, and one in Fribourg. Take a look!

October 2022

This fall the Joshua Monten Dance Company celebrates its tenth anniversary with a retrospective video.

Back in 2012 the title of our very first production was “About Strange Lands and People.” The title proved prescient for the work that followed. Exploring such wide-ranging topics as technologies of mood, interspecies relationships, fight clubs, game studies, sign language, gender performance and mating rituals, each production brought viewers glimpses of strange new artistic landscapes, and insight into the strangeness existing inside of each of us.

In the last ten years we’ve created eleven dance productions for upwards of 90,000 spectators. We’ve also had the honor to perform around the world in theaters, castles, alpine villages, refugee camps, beaches, factories, museums and schools.

August 2022

Two teams of dancers have just finished a heroic string of shows, with 21 performances in Bern, St. Gallen and La Chaux-de-Fonds. More than 7000 spectators came to see 21 performances of “How to Do Things with Words” and “Romeo, Romeo, Romeo” over the course of a week and a half.

The highlight of this month was the English-language premiere of the outdoor version of “How to Do Things with Words” at Buskers Bern Festival, and the French-language premiere of the same production at La Plage des Six Pompes.

A review in the Geneva weekly newspaper “Gauchebdo” had high praise for the production, calling it “both virtuosic and fluid, poetic and absurd…. There’s no doubt, one finds here the same  mixture of offbeat humor and demanding classical vocabulary as in certain work (like “Nelken”) signed by that high priestess of Tanztheater, Pina Bausch…. A marvel of singular strangeness.“

May 2022

As the weather gets warm, our Team Pink will be bringing “Game Theory” to festivals all around Europe and the Middle East. Twenty-four performances are planned in Vilnius, Aachen, Rastatt, Ramallah, Jerusalem and all around Switzerland.

We’re particularly looking forward to the Swiss national Tanzfest / Fête de la Danse on May 13/14/15, where we’ll be performing “Game Theory” in Thun, St. Gallen, Winterthur, Moutier, Rolle and Geneva.

We’re also looking forward to returning to Tête-à-Tête, Germany’s biggest street theater festival, for a week of “Game Theory” in Rastatt at the end of May.

February 2022

We’re off to a running start in 2022, as rehearsals for our new production have gone into high gear.

“How to Do Things with Words”  is a pas de deux between bodies and graphic text, between language and movement. How does one dance with text? What new meanings arise when dancers manipulate objects printed with words and phrases?

The results range from the literal to the poetic, from the meaningful to the absurd. Printed signs may be flat, but they add a surprising depth to a dance performance.

Performances are planned at the Dampfzentrale Bern from 17-19 February and Dock 11 Berlin from 24-26 February.

June 2021

The frost has finally melted: theaters in Switzerland have reopened and dance has returned. We are relieved… grateful… thrilled to hold the red-hot premiere of our newest dance production “The Pursuit of Happiness.” Six performances at the Dampfzentrale Bern are planned on 24, 25 and 26 June. Additional outdoor performances are planned in La Chaux-de-Fonds (CH) and Diepenheim (NL).

The U.S. Declaration of Independence famously insists on the rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But how is it really possible to hunt for happiness? Where does this strange beast reside? And how does our quest depend on the people around us? We believe that dance is a powerful tool for mood alteration, and an excellent way to look for answers.

September 2020

The Swiss newspaper “Der Bund” recently printed a portrait of Joshua Monten.

He describes the challenges of adapting his upcoming project “The Pursuit of Happiness” to new safety guidelines. Theaters in Switzerland and Germany  limit audience size and require face masks for audience members. Monten discusses the sharply reduced possibilities for touring in the months ahead and the challenges of adapting to ever- shifting travel regulations. He addresses the financial support provided by the  Swiss government during the months of lockdown, and the financial difficulties which his colleagues in the dance world still face.

June 2020

We’re back!

We are honored to be able to conduct one of the very first regular dance performances since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. The four young dancers of the Cie. MARCHEPIED(CH) will be performing Joshua Monten’s new creation “La parade nuptiale” at the Théâtre Sévelin 36 in Lausanne on 27 and 28 June.

The progress made in Switzerland to contain the spread of the coronavirus means that theaters have been allowed to reopen. With a safety measures in place — including spacing the spectators 1.5m apart, a system to collect contact information, and a choreographed entrance into the theater — we’ve been given the go-ahead from local authorities.

February 2020

The preparations for our new dance production “Game Theory” have gone into high gear.

Before dance tried to express anything, before it became art or ceremony, it was a game…

Come join us for the premiere on 21 February at the Dampfzentrale Bern — or another show at the renowned Krokusfestival Hasselt in Belgium — or at Dock 11 in Berlin.

The show is suitable for adult audiences and young viewers.

February 2020

Since 2013 Joshua Monten has been regularly participating in the Swiss national dance festival (Fête de la danse / Das Tanzfest), staging flash mobs, site-specific dance performances, school projects and giving dozens of performances of his outdoor works.

This year, he’s been invited to present the outdoor version of “Romeo, Romeo, Romeo” in seven different cities in May. The Romeos will be performing in parks,  plazas, train stations and cultural centers all the way from Geneva to St. Gallen.

To make things a bit more friendly, they’ll be preparing both French- and German-language versions of the piece. “Tu ne t’appelerais pas Juliette, par hazard?”