The Southbank Centre has announced its Spring / Summer 2025 Performance and Dance programme, offering audiences the unique opportunity to see brave, groundbreaking new work and contemporary collaborations from a multitude of international artists, many presenting work in the UK for the very first time.
The Spring / Summer 2025 international programme highlights include: Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s No President, Holly Blakey’s double bill of new dance works, Robyn Orlin’s We Wear Our Wheels with Pride, a UK premiere by Khashabi Theatre, performances by Rambert X (La)Horde and Sasha Waltz & Guests, and more.
Aaron Wright, Head of Performance and Dance at the Southbank Centre, says, “I’m pleased to announce this punchy new season of vibrant, distinctive and truly contemporary work, which not only pushes the definitions of dance and theatre but also offers UK audiences unique opportunities to see a wave of thought provoking UK debuts and premieres. We’ve brought together a topical programme of world class artists to innovate and entertain across the Southbank Centre stages. Everyone is welcome to come and join in the conversation!”
Tickets for the newly announced shows go on sale to Southbank Centre’s Members on Thursday 10 October at 10am, and to the general public on Friday 11 October at 10am at www.southbankcentre.co.uk.
SPRING / SUMMER PROGRAMME SHOW DETAILS:
Dewey Dell: The Rite of Spring
23 – 25 January 2025, Purcell Room (London premiere)
The leading Italian collective Dewey Dell brings their award-winning production The Rite of Spring, presented with MimeLondon to the Purcell Room for a mesmerising fusion of dance and performance theatre. Drawing inspiration from art history and animal behaviour, the piece delves into the eternal cycle of life and death and reimagines Igor Stravinsky’s revolutionary music score with raw, primal energy. The programme contains an additional prologue and epilogue of a soundscape curated by Demetrio Castellucci solely for this choreography. This astonishing new contemporary work offers audiences a fresh perspective on a timeless masterpiece. The Rite of Spring won the Danza&Danza award as the best Italian dance production in 2023.
Robyn Orlin: We Wear Our Wheels with Pride
Presented by Southbank Centre and Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels
21 – 22 March 2025, Queen Elizabeth Hall (UK premiere)
Leading South African choreographer Robyn Orlin with the Moving Into Dance Mophatong ensemble from Johannesburg share an explosive array of dance, song and costume with their ‘rickshaw dance’, We Wear Our Wheels with Pride, as part of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival. This UK premiere is a homage to the rickshaw drivers of South Africa’s past. In South Africa of the 1970s, at the height of apartheid, white masters were transported from place to place by Zulu men pulling brightly coloured rickshaws, a feat requiring a mixture of great strength and dexterity. Watching them, the young Robyn Orlin observed the ornate decoration of their vehicles and headdresses, as well as their sprightly, dance-like steps. The period also coincides with the creation of Moving into Dance Mophatong, a company nourished by Zulu traditions and a flagship for contemporary dance in South Africa. Audiences can expect vibrant costumes and visceral movement alongside a live performance of breathtaking singing from Anelia Stuurman in collaboration with the composer, Yogin Sullaphen.
Holly Blakey: A Wound with Teeth and Phantom
9 – 11 April 2025, Queen Elizabeth Hall (UK premiere)
London-based choreographer Holly Blakey returns to the Southbank Centre with two UK premieres A Wound With Teeth and Phantom this April. A Wound With Teeth looks at the impact of losing one’s memory and Blakey’s own experience with forgetting. Her choreography brings to the fore the strength of our imagination and how it allows us to be creative and inventive when we struggle to remember. Meanwhile, 10 dancers perform a meticulous ritual in Phantom to a rich soundscape of gauzy electronics and hypnotic beats composed by the musician Gwilym Gold. In collaboration with Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena, this tender and honest piece explores Blakey’s painful experience of experiencing a miscarriage.
Sasha Waltz & Guests x London Sinfonietta: In C
29 – 30 April 2025, Queen Elizabeth Hall (UK premiere)
As part of Multitudes, the Southbank Centre’s brand-new arts festival showcasing spectacular experiences where world-class orchestras join with some of the most ambitious and exciting artists, Salza Waltz joins the London Sinfonietta to present Terry Riley’s foundational minimalist work, In C, the revolutionary piece originally premiered in 1964. Sasha Waltz and her dancers develop choreographic material that follows a similarly variable structure, deliberately designed not to be fixed.
Rambert X (La)Horde: Bring Your Own
7 – 10 May 2025, Queen Elizabeth Hall (world premiere)
Rambert presents the world premiere of ‘Bring Your Own’, a brand new programme in collaboration with the incandescent French choreographic trio (La)Horde. With two restagings of (La)Horde’s most iconic pieces – Weather is Sweet and Room with a View – along with a fresh commission especially created for the Rambert dancers, the programme promises grit, sensuality, and a fierce encounter with ourselves. Drenched in neon lights and inspired by the LA club scene, Weather is Sweet catapults audiences into very contemporary questions over intimacy, consent and sex-positivity. Visceral and punchy, A Room with a View forces us to look in the mirror and ask – what do I care about?
13 – 14 May 2025, Purcell Room
In his typical hybrid style, combining music, cutting-edge video and robotic performers, the Jaha Koo reflects on cultural assimilation with all its conflicts and paradoxes. In a performance that plays with all the senses, he alters our perception of food for good. In Haribo Kimchi, we find ourselves in a pojangmacha, a typical late-night snack bar that can be found scattered across the streets of South Korea. There we meet several lost souls: a YouTuber, an eel, a toad and a rice cooker. They take us on a culinary journey, exploring food culture as a form of language that reveals the structure of a society.
Presented in collaboration with Shubbak Festival
24 – 25 May 2025, Queen Elizabeth Hall (UK premiere)
The independent Palestinian Khasabi Theatre under the directorship of Bashar Murkus and Khulood Basel showcase their visual masterpiece MILK at the Queen Elizabeth Hall this spring. Presented in collaboration with Shubbak Festival, the piece examines the cause and impact of a disaster. Bashar Murkus brings to light how time becomes blurred before and after a devastation. The past becomes the present, and the future loses all meaning other than becoming endless repetition? As this fractured catastrophe takes place, a group of women look everywhere for their lost motherhood.
Nature Theater of Oklahoma: No President. A Story Ballet of Enlightenment in Two Immoral Acts
9 – 11 July 2025, Queen Elizabeth Hall (UK premiere)
The New York-based, award-winning collective Nature Theater of Oklahoma presents their long awaited London debut with No President. A Story Ballet of Enlightenment in Two Immoral Acts to the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall for its UK Premiere. This fiercely political piece blends ballet, silent film, slapstick and contemporary dance to Tchaikovsky’s famous score The Nutcracker. The story unfolds at a theatre where former actors compete against ex-ballet dancers to protect a precious theatre curtain. It is not long before conflicts are resolved through violence, love, hope and redemption. Nature Theatre of Oklahoma is directed by Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper.
For more information, visit www.southbankcentre.co.uk.
