Welcome

Welcome to the 2025 Echo Echo Festival of Dance and Movement.

The festival runs from the 6th March to the 21st March 2025.

As well as productions from both parts of Ireland, we have artists and companies from Bulgaria, Lithuania, Sweden and Malaysia bringing their work from further afield. Please check out all the details of the wonderful programme and join us for as many of the performances and workshops as you can.

This edition of the festival, being the tenth one, feels like a bit of a milestone and a time for a short reflection.

We organised the first festival in 2013 as part of Derry’s year as City of Culture. That first year gave us the opportunity to establish the festival as a high quality event, tightly focused on small and medium scale work that was aligned with both the special approach that Echo Echo takes to dance as an art form, and the particular, unique and wonderful qualities of Derry as a place.

We have been lucky enough to have had a marvellous range of artists and companies from near and far performing and teaching at the festival over the years and many of those who have participated  have remained connected to both Echo Echo and Derry, returning to the city to collaborate, create, teach and perform.

These connections, going deeper than a fleeting experience of a single performance, have contributed to the development and enhancement of a rich community of interest around Echo Echo which includes the closer ring of Derry-based Associate Artists and members of the Echo Echo Ensemble, a ring of colleagues based in different places in Ireland, and an even wider ring of artists from all over Europe and the wider world.

There has been a depth of supportive cross-fertilisation of ideas and approaches emerging from the festival. Those deeper relationships have been an essential element in developing and sustaining the quality and qualities of the broad practice of Echo Echo in production, performance, education, participation.

I notice that at different times and in different moods, different pieces from the rich palette of nine festivals and many dozens of shows come into my memory. There’s hardly been any less than absolutely excellent performances, so although today it is Fabrik Company’s Pandora 88 (2013), Mirva Mäkinen’s Spherical Space (2015), John Scott’s Heroes (2018) and Maria Svensson’s The Importance of Shepherds (2017) that seem to resonate most with me. On other days others tend to spring to mind.

The years since 2013 have brought their challenges. Everyone knows how many of the hopes lifted by Derry’s status of City of Culture for one year were deflated by the subsequent reduction in resources for the arts in the city. However reasonable or unreasonable that seemed to be in the economic and political context it has certainly posed challenges for sustaining the festival.

To be honest, the continued quality of the festival programme has depended on immense goodwill from artistic colleagues towards Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company as producer of the festival. Without the flexibility, imagination and positive attitude of our creative colleagues on the island of Ireland and beyond, we would probably have had to discontinue the festival entirely.

Even more important has been the good will, imagination, hard work and attention to detail and principle of the whole team at Echo Echo – staff, ensemble, associate artists and board.

Most important of all has been the consistent interest, enthusiasm and encouragement of our audiences and participants.

I want to thank all of the above from the bottom of my heart.

I also want to express my gratitude to our funders over the years. These have included a wide range of institutions but in particular I want to thank Derry City and Strabane District Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland without whose consistent and ongoing support neither the festival nor Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company itself would be able to exist in anything like the form they do.

...so, here we are, having managed to produce nine festivals and now looking forward to the tenth one full of quality and qualities...

Please have a good look at the programme, come along to some events this year and support the festival to ensure that there will be an eleventh edition and more.

Archived on the Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company’s website here you can also find all of the brochures for previous festivals if you’d like to look back and revisit some memories to prime yourself for what’s on offer in March. 

Steve Batts

Artistic Director & Co-Founder, Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company