One Dance Festival 19th

One Dance is Bulgaria’s leading international contemporary dance festival, with 19 years of history and an extensive network of European and international partners. Since its establishment in 2008, the festival has played an important role in bringing internationally recognised contemporary dance and performance practices to Bulgarian audiences and in connecting the Bulgarian dance scene with the wider European and global context.

The festival presents established and emerging choreographers, companies and artists from Bulgaria and abroad, reflecting diverse developments and approaches within contemporary dance and performance. Alongside its artistic programme, One Dance develops workshops, talks, professional meetings, residencies, co-productions and other formats that support artistic exchange, audience development and professional networking.

One Dance Festival has been a tribune of contemporary dance of the highest quality in Bulgaria for 18 years. A leading event of its kind in the Balkans, it presents a bold, innovative and diverse programme of techniques, styles and messages. For 6 years, the festival has co-produced talents from all over the world, whose performances have rapidly conquered international stages, winning awards and worldwide recognition. The festival partners with Bulgarian and foreign institutions, funding organisations, and conducts training programs for amateurs and professionals, championing the cause of cultural decentralisation and audience access to quality global cultural content.

One Dance Festival's programme reflects the richness of aesthetics, innovation of expressive means and genres of dance art, with issues and themes directly related to the dynamics of our personal and collective existence today. We believe that dance connects across cultural affiliations, languages, nationalities and identities. For us, European values such as tolerance, inclusion of marginalised and vulnerable communities, pluralism of opinion, freedom of expression and democratisation of access to culture are not hollow phrases. They are the themes of art, whose main function is to provoke, to change, to accept and to converge.

One Dance Festival is one of the initiators of Dance Festivals Network Europe, an organisation that will work towards new models for the development and support of the contemporary dance sector. The new coalition brings together 23 festivals from 22 countries across Europe, building on the core founding members of the Big Pulse Dance Alliance.

Big Pulse Dance Alliance (a Creative Europe-funded project) is the first alliance of 12 influential dance festivals and organisations to create European content through artist co-production, training and mobility. https://www.bigpulsedance.eu

With 23 partners in 22 countries across Europe, the Visiting Artist Programme is a collaborative project aimed at stimulating artistic development, creative exchange and valuable networking. Having started as an activity within Big Pulse Dance Alliance, the Visiting Artist Programme gained momentum, leading to 91 artists benefiting from 16 encounters between 2021 – 2024. The programme was awarded its own Creative Europe funding for a 2-year project (Feb 2025 – Jan 2027). https://www.visitingartistprogramme.eu/