This year’s program celebrates the persistence and imagination of independent theatre, dance and performance at a moment when the very possibility of making this kind of work is under pressure. This is the fragile, necessary space that experimental artists and gatherings like HOLD ON LET GO have always protected: a space for contemporary performance that asks artists and audiences to lean into uncertainty, stay with complexity, and dream new possibilities for a world in visible collapse.

From February 3-7, over five days and nights, the Russian Hall will become a shared studio — a porous setting to test forms, reach across disciplines and witness work that refuses easy categorization. The artists in this year’s program speak from where they stand while also reaching toward larger, messier questions: works that examine our intimate ecosystems even as they hold wider systems to account.

These visionary works will move us — zooming out and in and out again, drawing attention to what is right here and what still feels impossibly far away in this current cycle of reconstruction. Seen through the eyes of the artists in the program, collapse can reveal many things — transformation, connection and renewal. Our festival gatherings make room for reflection, agitation and states of newness and building. And…there will be music! 

Please join us in holding on, letting go and staying with each other inside all that is shifting.