Breaking Bach/Edinburgh International Festival

Breaking Bach?Edinburgh International Festival
Usher Hall

Breaking Bach will premiere at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on Wednesday, August 20 as part of the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival.

There will be a further performance at the George Enescu International Festival in Bucharest on Thursday, September 11, with events in London and elsewhere to be announced.

Watch the trailer here: LINK TEXT

The production celebrates the rhythmic intelligence and astuteness of a new generation of dancers, with a background in street dance, break dance and Hip Hop, inviting them to engage with the complexities in Bach’s music in fresh and innovative ways. The project is a direct outcome of the OAE’s groundbreaking residency at Acland Burghley School in Camden in north London, home to a talented, committed dance community where many of the young dancers featured in the programme are or were students.

In 2023, a conversation between the OAE’s chief executive, Crispin Woodhead, and Kim Brandstrup gave birth to the idea of co-creating a new dance piece exploring the unlikely symbiosis between the rhythms of Bach and the grooves of hip hop. Even more excitingly, this offered the opportunity to break down conventions by involving young people who have the moves of street dance in their bones as partners with an equal voice in the creative process.

During the summer of 2023, Brandstrup and the dancers – now joined by two professional dancers, Tommy Franzen and Deavion Brown (who also assisted him in the choreographic process) – devised an 18-minute piece to Bach’s Double Violin Concerto. In October 2023 this was performed to an audience of peers, family, friends and invited arts sector professionals.

This August, the next leg of the odyssey sees Breaking Bach become a full-length production and hit the stage of the world’s biggest arts festival for its premiere. The 2025 Breaking Bach ensemble is made up of professional dancers working alongside talented young dancers selected through auditions - many of them students and former students of Acland Burghley School.

Breaking Bach will include performances by the OAE of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto and Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 as well as other orchestral works and pieces for solo instruments.

"The musicians of the OAE and I are facilitating this meeting of a group of street dancers and Bach. We are helping the dancers ‘break the code’ of some of the composer’s most complex music - while encouraging them to break any stylistic rule in the book in order to respond and enjoy the rhythmical power of Bach’s music." - Kim Brandstrup

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