The Story
OrganizerDance Bridges was born out of the World Dance Alliance Global Summit in Angers, France in 2014, where Vanessa Mirza, a Kolkata-based contemporary dance practitioner, identified an opportunity to build an institutional platform for contemporary dance in India that was genuinely international rather than tourism-oriented. Established in 2016, the festival is unusual in its tripartite management structure: Vanessa Mirza Creations (India), Van Huynh Company (UK, led by Viv Van Huynh), and Anarchy Dance Theatre (Taiwan, a leading Taipei contemporary dance company) jointly curate and manage the event, ensuring that it operates as a genuine international collaboration rather than an Indian festival that imports foreign acts. This structural commitment to international co-management gives the Dance Bridges residency programme its distinctive character: selected artists from South Asian and international contexts work together on newly commissioned pieces that are presented at the festival, creating work that exists because of the festival rather than merely being presented by it. The 6th edition, themed Converging Identities, draws artists from Spain, France, Italy, Canada, the UK, Taiwan, Brazil, and India, alongside participants from Bangladesh, Denmark, Nigeria, and Tunisia. The 2026 artist line-up includes Esther Latorre and Hugo Pereira, Dom Czapski, Laura Kenyon, Francesco Colaleo and Maxime Freixas, Ralph Escamillan, Miguel Angelo, Asish Singha, Aseng Borang, and Chen Yu-Chi. The festival is supported by an executive board comprising representatives from Kolkata's dance, arts, music, education, business, and cultural communities, giving it an unusually broad local institutional base for a dance festival of this scale.
Dance Bridges occupies a singular position in India's performing arts ecosystem: it is the country's most internationally embedded contemporary dance festival, and the only one with a tri-continental management structure that gives it genuine creative credibility with international choreographers and curators. Contemporary dance as a practice in India exists in an institutional no-man's land between classical forms (which have strong institutional support) and popular music and theatre (which have commercial infrastructure). Dance Bridges provides the international platform and production support that working contemporary dance artists in India need to develop work at international standard, and the residency model ensures that the festival produces new work rather than merely presenting existing repertoire. Kolkata is an unusual but appropriate host: the city has a strong experimental arts tradition, an engaged arts audience, and a cultural infrastructure (theatres, galleries, institutions) that can support multi-venue festival programming.
Contemporary dance in India lacks institutional homes and international production platforms. Dance Bridges, now in its sixth biennial edition, provides both, and the 2026 Converging Identities theme addresses the most pressing question in contemporary performance globally: how do we make and receive work across cultural difference? The festival's presence in Kolkata is particularly significant given the city's strong experimental arts tradition.
Over six biennial editions, Dance Bridges has commissioned new work by South Asian and international choreographers collaborating in residence, presenting work that exists only because of the festival's production support. It has built Kolkata's profile as a serious site for contemporary international dance, and Vanessa Mirza's artistic leadership has created a network between India's contemporary dance community and counterparts in the UK, Taiwan, and beyond.
