Today we celebrate International Dance Day!
World Message for International Dance Day, April 29, 2025
Author of the message: Mihail BARYSHNIKOV, dancer and choreographer – Latvia / USA
It’s often said that dance can express the unspeakable. Joy, grief, and despair become visible; embodied expressions of our shared fragility. In this, dance can awaken empathy, inspire kindness, and spark a desire to heal rather than harm. Especially now—as hundreds of thousands endure war, navigate political upheaval, and rise in protest against injustice—honest reflection is vital. It’s a heavy burden to place on the body, on dance, on art. Yet art is still the best way to give form to the unspoken, and we can begin by asking ourselves: Where is my truth? How do I honor myself and my community? Whom do I answer to?
Croatian Message for International Dance Day, April 29, 2025
Author of the message: Andreja Jeličić – ballet pedagogue and theorist
The dance of small children is pure joy of life.
Dancing for us, grown-ups, can also be joyful. It can be surrendering to the rhythm of the body and music, an awakening of the inner being—cheerful, wise, sometimes sensual. Through dance, we can connect, immerse ourselves in the rhythm of the group, root ourselves in the community, or escape from everything, finding a sense of forgetfulness in dance.
For us adults, dance can also be a profession. It is our work, our hard labor, our livelihood. We research it, describe it, analyze it, record it, construct it, deconstruct it, practice it, and perfect it endlessly. Dancing is a serious matter. Through it, we can teach and nurture: through dance, through life. Dance can be healing.
Today, when an epochal dance of death and violence—a new barbaric Pyrrhic dance—is choreographed by elders obsessed with power, dragging entire countries and nations into it, and when the deafening tapping of millions of keyboards and the heavy hum of “smart” machines systematically unmind us, demotivate us, and disembody us—dance becomes (or remains) an act of resistance. Dancing today is for the brave.
Dance. Alone and with others. Dance consciously and with intent, passionately, contemplatively, with love. Dance.
On the occasion of International Dance Day, Denis Matvienko will hold an open ballet class on the main stage of the Croatian National Theatre in Split starting at 10 AM (you can follow the live broadcast on our YouTube channel), and at 8:30 PM, the Ballet Studio and Ballet of the Croatian National Theatre Split will celebrate the day with a dance collage The Magic of Dance.