DANCE EUROPA
Dance Europa Est. 1998 Book tickets →
A dancer suspended mid-leap above a stage washed in deep blue light

International dance company — since 1998

Europe dances as one body

Eleven opera houses. Twenty-seven nationalities. One season that crosses the continent, October to June.

The manifesto

Written in Paris in 1998. Read aloud by the company at the start of every season.

We believe that a body rising in Naples and a body folding in Oslo speak the same language — and that this language is the oldest one in Europe.

Dance Europa is not a building. It is an itinerary. Every autumn, eighty-six dancers leave their cities to meet on a single stage; every spring they leave again carrying a work that none of them could have written alone.

We stage the classical repertoire the way restorers approach a fresco — patiently, and without nostalgia. We commission new work the way you open a window. And we teach, because a company that does not teach is a company quietly going out.

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European houses
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Permanent dancers
0
Performances a season
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Nationalities
Dancers caught in long exposure, dissolving into a field of deep blue light

“Spectres”, created 2025 — fifteen minutes, not one fixed light.

Stage photography — Vienna

What we dance

Six repertoires,
one standard

Every dancer in the company works in at least two of the six. It has been the rule since 1998 — and it is the reason our new work sounds like no one else's.

01
Classical ballet
The nineteenth-century repertoire, played on period instruments, in the halls it was written for.
02
Contemporary dance
Twelve commissions each season, all of them to choreographers under forty.
03
Creation & research
A standing laboratory in Dresden: light, sound, materials, augmented bodies.
04
Character dance
Flamenco, tango, the folk forms of the continent — collected, taught, never embalmed.
05
Urban dance
An associate troupe of eighteen, recruited from the outer districts of all eleven cities.
06
Transmission
The Lyon Academy: forty students, seven teachers, a full scholarship for every one of them.

Season 2026 · 2027

Six premieres,
eleven cities

Full season →
Portrait of Émilie Vasseur, Chief of International Dancer

Portrait

Émilie Vasseur

Chief of International Dancer

You do not run an international company from an office. You run it from stage left, three minutes before curtain, when nobody in the wings is speaking their mother tongue.

Trained in Lyon and then in Saint Petersburg, Émilie Vasseur danced twelve seasons before taking charge of Dance Europa's international dancers. She oversees recruitment, casting and the career of every one of the company's eighty-six artists across the eleven houses of the network.

Joined the company
2011
Title
Chief of International Dancer
Based in
Paris · Vienna
Working languages
FR · EN · RU · IT

The network

Eleven houses,
one stage

Hover a city to step inside its hall.

The Academy

Forty students,
seven teachers

In Lyon, inside a former silk workshop, forty dancers aged fourteen to twenty receive a complete training every year — and a scholarship. No exceptions, no tuition fees.

A rehearsal in progress in a dance studio
Pointe shoes in close-up
Backstage machinery in an opera house

What they say

You leave Nocturnes the way you leave a dream you have somehow kept at the right temperature. Le Monde — Paris
The only company on the continent able to make an entire tour feel like a single gesture. Corriere della Sera — Milan
Eighty-six dancers, twenty-seven passports, and not one visible border on the stage. Der Standard — Vienna

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