Festival WhyNot #8: Ancient Futures 2026

Festival WhyNot #8: Ancient FuturesFestival WhyNot #8 – Ancient Futures is a three-day celebration of movement, sound, and collective imagination. From the monumental Felix Meritis building in the heart of Amsterdam, with satellite events and interventions across the city, the festival explores how we can draw from ancestral knowledge, ritual, and embodied intelligence to imagine futures that are more connected, sustainable, and humane. For over a decade, WhyNot has been pushing the boundaries of contemporary dance by taking it out of its conventional theatre context and placing it in unexpected environments: from museums to clubs, rooftops, and urban spaces. The platform stands for artistic innovation, interdisciplinary experimentation, and the creation of spaces where audiences, artists, and disciplines encounter each other in new ways. With Ancient Futures, the festival continues this trajectory and invites artists and audiences to travel through time: backwards and forwards at once. What ancient gestures, collective dances, or forgotten rhythms can help us navigate an age of technological acceleration and ecological crisis? Can movement itself become a tool for re-connection and re-enchantment? The programme brings together an exciting constellation of choreographers, performers, musicians, and visual artists from the Netherlands and abroad. It includes interdisciplinary performances, live music, installations, workshops, and club nights where the boundaries between stage and dance floor dissolve. Artists such as Connor Schumacher, Thais Di Marco, and Charles Pass explore the rave as a contemporary ritual of collectivity; others transform myths and ecological narratives into immersive performative experiences. By night, the festival transforms Felix Meritis into a living organism, a multi-sensory playground of sound, light, and movement. By day, it offers space for reflection through talks, workshops, and intimate encounters with the artists.Although Felix Meritis forms the beating heart of the event, Ancient Futures reaches into the city through outdoor performances and site-specific activations. Temporary interventions in public space invite residents and passers-by to encounter dance unexpectedly.