CoFestival 2026 – Samwel Japhet: BECOMING: From the Streets to Now

An autobiographical dance solo is not only the artist’s own story of survival strategies and the will to live, but becomes the story of everyman, of anyone trying to fight their way out of desperate circumstances towards a life of human dignity.

In its modern phase, the beginnings of contemporary dance in Europe and the United States are tied to a decision made by women artists: to tell their own stories with their own bodies, within the art of dance, and not to be disciplined by any ballet choreographer’s desires and projections. The beginnings of dance expressionism were thus the embodying and arranging of one’s own stories, affects and feelings in a relatively formal manner, ideally without the artistic assistance of those practices that might colonise the artist’s own will. A form of dance self-narration. In the nearly four decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, dance cultural systems across Europe have produced an inflation of commodified forms of dance self-narration. All of this coincides with the literary genre of so-called autofiction, where readers nowadays need to be very selective.

BECOMING: From the Streets to Now (2026), the autobiographical solo by Tanzanian dance artist Samwel Japhet, astounds the viewer with something that holds too much reality to be turned into a commodity on the dance market. It is the formulation of his own existential experience, of the struggle for survival, of wrestling with a life that offers no shelter, while at the same time his story surpasses his own geopolitical borders. As a child of the streets, the artist grappled with the kind of life that social realists from Dickens onwards described to us in Europe, and one that regains its relevance at a time when we had hoped never to return to certain levels of social injustice. We are familiar to a certain extent with the dance tools that Japhet uses, yet they become startlingly real, brutal and moving when danced by a body that truly understands its dance.

Concept, Choreography and Performance: Samwel Japhet
Producer and PR: Noreen Nicolaus
Original Music: Sigermaxter and Ado Ado (used with permission by Esama)
Film Projection: Jimmy Mathias

Produced with the support of: The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, Georgetown University

Organised by Kino Šiška and NDA Slovenija in collaboration with Zavod Bunker