20hertz - VV I Energy

In the diptych VV | ENERGY, 20Hertz, a professional dance company consisting of hearing, hard-of-hearing, and deaf dancers, takes you with a new dance style from stillness to euphoria: from a dreamlike world full of visual intensity to an overwhelming explosion of light, rhythm, and energy.

The first piece focuses on Visual Vernacular: an expressive form of storytelling from deaf culture that is unknown in the Netherlands. Together with American VV artist Justin Perez, choreographer Sharon Wesseling – herself hard-of-hearing and nominated for the Innovatieprijs van de Nederlandse Dansdagen 2025 – and her performers explore how stories can be told not only with hands and facial expressions, but with entire bodies, space, and technology.

The second piece lets the audience experience what it is like to live as a deaf person in a hearing world. The piece emphasizes overstimulation: urban moves, beats, vibrations, and festival-like energy flood the venue. The audience is immersed in a world that can be both exhilarating and exhausting; a metaphor for the daily reality in which many deaf and hard-of-hearing people hold their own. VV | ENERGY thus breaks through the classic dramatic arc of the theater and shows how stimuli, rhythms, and energy can be experienced in different ways, hearing or not. The result is a sensory total experience in which dance, visuals, light, and sound merge into a new, inclusive language.