NEXT is Conny Janssen Danst’s newest and perhaps most adventurous project since 2024. Every year this initiative offers a talented choreographer the opportunity to create a compact production with the company’s dancers. NEXT is a production radiating urban energy and emerging at unexpected venues. For NEXT #2 Dalton Jansen creates ‘Bite the Bullet’, a choreography in which he reflects on the hardening and polarization in society. Together with seven dancers from Conny Janssen Danst he searches for a positive sound in a time of division.
Dalton Jansen
For this second edition of NEXT, Dalton Jansen is taking on the challenge of developing new work with seven dancers and taking it into town. The ambitious, young choreographer and enterprising maker has already won several prizes with his passionate way of working, including the BNG Dance Prize 2021, the ‘VSCD Jonge Zwaan 2022’ for the most impressive dance production for young people and in 2024 the Charlotte Köhler Theater Talent Award.
Dalton’s choreographies are at the intersection of hiphop and contemporary and always highlight current social themes. In 2021 he founded his own dance company BLACK BIRDS in Rotterdam-West. For Theater Rotterdam he recently created JAH (2024) and in collaboration with DOX and Toneelmakerij a contemporary adaptation of Giselle.
This new collaboration with Conny Janssen Danst in NEXT #2 is a nice follow-up step to his successful choreographic contributions in 2020 for the talent development program DANSLOKAAL 8 and in 2023 in VERS&GERS.
Dalton Jansen appeals to the raw and intimate in his work, unites different dance languages and juxtaposes reconciliation with distance. Jury BNG Bank Danceprize (2021)
NEXT offers a stage for creativity and innovation of makers and dancers and at the same time pushes the boundaries of traditional places of performance. Presenting a dance work at different locations and for different occasions breaks through fixed patterns, allowing makers to develop a new perspective on their work. With Dalton Jansen as choreographer of this second edition, I am convinced that the audience will be taken on a dynamic, urban dance adventure. Conny Janssen