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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 organizations, and conducts training programs for amateurs and professionals, championing the cause of cultural decentralization 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.

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 benefitting from 16 encounters between 2021 – 2024. The programme being awarded its own Creative Europe funding for a 2-year project (Feb 2025 – Jan 2027).

The Visiting Artist Programme is one of the projects that form part of Dance Festivals Network Europe, a coalition of European dance festivals dedicated to advancing contemporary dance’s role in building a sustainable, inclusive and innovative future.

https://www.visitingartistprogramme.eu/

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, based in Amsterdam, 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. ODF is the only representative from the Balkans.

https://www.bigpulsedance.eu