Compagnie Amala Dianor Kaplan Underflow

ImpulsTanz Festival [ENA] If any choreographer has spent the last decade patiently rewiring the relationship between the stage and the street, it is Amala Dianor. The Franco-Senegalese choreographer returned to the Volkstheater for the world premiere of Underflow — the ImPulsTanz commission that continues, and quietly surpasses, the DUB he brought to the same house last summer. Where DUB still moved inside the grammar of the club.

Underflow is his most confident statement yet that this grammar deserves — and can carry — a proper theatrical evening. Dianor came to contemporary dance from hip-hop battles, entered the CNDC in Angers in the class of 2002, danced for Emanuel Gat and Françoise and Dominique Dupuy, and founded his Kaplan / Compagnie Amala Dianor in 2012 after winning the Reconnaissance prize with Crossroad. That biography is audible in every phrase of Underflow: the elegance of a contemporary-trained body, the pulse of a battler, the discipline of a choreographer who has spent more than a decade with the electro-soul composer Awir Leon at his side.

Awir Leon is once again on stage as DJ and live musician — he will reappear at the Rathaus Arkadenhof for the festival's "biggest expressions ever '26" — and his warm, unhurried sub-bass is the piece's actual dramaturg. What Dianor puts on the historic Volkstheater stage is a coexistence, not a fusion. Krump's percussive chest-hits, waacking's whip-fast arm-lines, coupé-décalé's Abidjan swagger, the low-slung, hip-articulated Johannesburg Pantsula that he first encountered through his commission for Via Katlehong: each style keeps its accent, and each dancer is allowed to speak in that accent, before Dianor gently modifies the choreography from within so the vocabularies begin to hear one another.

The result is a piece whose politics live in its listening. "Not as a unified form," Dianor writes, "but as a space of coexistence, listening and shared transformation." At sixty minutes, Underflow never lectures. It swings, it holds, it drops, it grins. And it makes one thing luminously clear: the underground, when trusted rather than curated, can fill a nineteenth-century proscenium without losing an atom of its intimacy. This is one of the most joyful, generous and quietly radical premieres of the festival's forty-third edition.