JULY 23-26. WOMAD, THE WORLD’S FESTIVAL / WILTSHIRE, UK
How lovely it is to travel through music
Womad was invented by Peter Gabriel, and the first edition, in 1982, went so badly financially that Genesis had to play a reunion concert to cover the debts. Yet at one of the more recent editions, when the crowd was asked from the stage who had been there for that very first Womad, plenty of hands went up. That’s because Womad helped define a whole way of putting on a festival: celebrating the world’s cultural diversity and richness through music, art, and dance, bringing in artists from everywhere. Since Brexit, the festival has been running into serious difficulties obtaining visas for international artists — back in 2022, for the 40th anniversary, Gabriel, a passionate europhile and globalist, reminded the government of the importance of the free movement of culture. After taking 2025 off to do some soul-searching, the festival is back in a new location, on the Corsham estate in Wiltshire. The lineup is a celebration in itself, and it’s all on Spotify: from the Colombian electronic group Acid Pantera, to Portugal’s Ana Lua Baiano, to DJ Travella, a DJ from the underground “singeli” scene in Dar es Salaam, all the way to Aboriginal gospel singer and guitarist Kankawa Nagarra, who released her first album at the age of eighty, beating out Nick Cave for Australia’s top music prize. How lovely it is to travel through music.
JULY 15, 2026-JANUARY 17, 2027. ANA MENDIETA / LONDON, UK
The source of energy can flow through everything
When an artist dies, who becomes the owner of her story? That’s the question at the heart of a New York Times story on the artist Ana Mendieta and her family’s battle to preserve her artistic and human legacy. Born in Cuba and forcibly relocated to the United States at age twelve, separated from her homeland and her family (the experience of uprootedness runs through her art), she worked with the body and with nature, seeking out “the universal source of energy that flows through everything.” In the “Silueta Series,” for example, she immersed herself in the landscape, covering herself with earth and flowers, in a practice she called “Earth-body art.” She wanted to become bigger than Frida Kahlo, and perhaps she would have, but in 1985, at 36, she fell from the window of her apartment, on the 35th floor of a Greenwich Village skyscraper, after an argument with her husband, the minimalist artist Carl Andre. He was arrested and tried for murder — his lawyer used Mendieta’s own works as evidence of her psychological instability and hinted at suicide — and was ultimately acquitted. Her family, friends, and the art community have never stopped contesting that version of events. Since then, her story has become the subject of many retellings, even ones beyond her heirs’ control (a novel inspired by her life, Xochitl Gonzalez’s “Anita de Monte Laughs Last,” has just been published in Italy by Fazi). Now, though, attention can return to the power of her own work, in the retrospective dedicated to her at Tate Modern in London.
JUNE 29-JULY 31. GREC FESTIVAL / BARCELONA, SPAIN
The most European comedy genre: the family lunch
The Grec is Barcelona’s performing arts festival: theater, dance, music, but also film. The 50th edition began on Monday and runs through the whole month (the fifty posters in the festival’s archive are collector’s items in their own right). Among the most interesting events is “La truita,” written by Baptiste Amann and directed by Ferran Utzet, a classic comedy set during a family lunch: a couple who’ve just moved to the countryside for retirement invite their daughters, partners, and grandchildren over, and one daughter, a pescatarian, refuses to eat the meat stew — comedy built around a table, or unfolding in a single room, where a narrative device draws out resentments, secrets, and skeletons in the closet, is perhaps the most European genre of all. There’s also a production of Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera,” a reinterpretation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” set in Andy Warhol’s Factory, a wordless mask-theater show by the Basque company Kulunka Teatro, “Bach’s Project” — a musical production with 26 people on stage, including dancers, singers, a string quartet, a chamber choir, and choreography by Mal Pelo — and also one of China’s leading dance companies, TAO.
JULY 3-11. KARLOVY VARY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL / KARLOVY VARY, CZECH REPUBLIC
Vital stories from Central and Eastern Europe
The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is the most important festival in Central Europe, not least because it’s the region’s main platform for the film industry. Two initiatives in particular showcase the area’s creative vitality. This year sees the debut of a program offering eight selected writers the chance to pitch their novels to professionals interested in acquiring adaptation rights. These are European stories portraying a continent in transformation, whose center of gravity is shifting ever further east. Among the selected titles is a coming-of-age story by journalist Patrik Banga, set in Prague’s Roma neighborhood; “Cupid at the Kremlin Wall” by Georgian writer Aka Morchiladze, about the years of Stalinist terror; and a sweeping panorama of twentieth-century Ukraine by Sofia Andrukhovych. The festival also runs a program dedicated to supporting projects already underway, connecting eleven films in production with potential partners for co-production, financing, and distribution. Then there’s the lineup of 55 new titles in competition, drawn from this year’s European festival season, including “A Sad and Beautiful World” by the very talented Cyril Aris, and the comedy “How to Divorce During a War” by Andrius Blazevicius, in which a Lithuanian couple navigates a divorce while Ukraine faces the Russian invasion.
JULY 8-12. RIDDU RIĐĐU / MANNDALEN, NORWAY
A night in Norway with a DJ from the Pantanal
Picture a night under Norway’s midnight sun, with a DJ set from an indigenous Terena artist hailing from Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands. That’s what’s in store at Riddu Riđđu, the indigenous culture festival held since 1991 in Manndalen, in the municipality of Kåfjord, in North Troms, dedicated to spreading knowledge of and pride in the Sámi people, Scandinavia’s indigenous population, long assimilated by the Norwegians. Eric Terena — also journalist, a producer and climate activist, founder of Mídia Indígena — makes electronic music blended with indigenous and Brazilian sounds and sampled nature recordings, and will share the stage with Sámi folk musicians and vocalists performing Laestadian hymns and joik, alongside electronic and improvised music; with Mongolian musicians (there’s a format called “Concert in a Yurt”), Inuit, Alaskan, and Greenlandic artists, and even Seun Kuti & Egypt 80.
JULY. LILY ALLEN WEST END TOUR / VARIOUS CITIES
The tour about processing the end of a marriage
Looking for advice on processing the end of a marriage? Lily Allen made an album out of it, “West End Girl,” and now a tour, currently making its way through Europe (the album came out in 2025, and an earlier leg of the tour already happened months ago). So maybe, for her, the answer is: play my music in Denmark, Finland, London, Bilbao, Bern, Berlin. The “West End Tour” is the dramatic staging of her extremely dramatic record, the story of the collapse and end of her marriage to actor David Harbour. The short version: she moves to New York for him, into a house they can barely afford, then goes back to London for a stage role; he tells her over the phone that he wants to open up the marriage; she agrees even though she doesn’t want to, because he manipulates her; it all falls apart. They separate, it’s not civil, there’s no restraint, she insults him and makes him look ridiculous, she’s furious and pathetic (aren’t we all). The show follows the album track by track, and for Allen, staging it has been part of a cathartic, exorcism-like process — one that has turned out to be a moment of “collective healing” for the audience too. There’s plenty of humor and plenty of camp, in the costumes, the staging, the body language. Someone should really establish an official canon for pop stars who end relationships with unpleasant men and then write songs that make them look ridiculous.
JULY 3-18. MONTREUX JAZZ FESTIVAL / MONTREUX, SWITZERLAND
Eventually, everyone passes through Montreux
Van Morrison, Sting, Moby, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Raye, and Jovanotti will all play the Montreux Jazz Festival, on Lake Geneva, one of the festivals with the richest store of anecdotes in the world. It was invented in 1967 by Claude Nobs, who at the time worked at the tourist office, and who in that very first edition already managed to bring in Ella Fitzgerald, Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, and Nina Simone, who returned to play many times (her 1976 concert, the most jaw-dropping of all, can be found online). Two anecdotes stand out above the rest: in 1971 the casino burned down while Deep Purple were in town recording an album, which is how “Smoke on the Water” came to be, with Nobs — a volunteer firefighter who had worked hard to get people evacuated — becoming the “Funky Claude” of the song. Another time, over lunch, he suggested that Bowie and Queen collaborate, “no pressure” (they, of course, felt “under pressure”). To understand how a small town tucked among the mountains became one of the centers of the international music industry, and Nobs a central figure in 1970s music, alongside the documentary series “They All Came Out to Montreux” there’s also an exhibition open during the festival that traces this whole trajectory, a cabinet of curiosities filled with archival photos and video material and original posters by the likes of Keith Haring and Jean Tinguely. As for the music itself, there are over 700 concerts, 600 of them free.
JULY 4-25. FESTIVAL D’AVIGNON / AVIGNON, FRANCE
Eighty questions, on stage, about the present and the future
The 80th edition of the Avignon Festival, France’s leading theater and dance event, will close at dawn on Sunday, July 26, in the courtyard of the Palais des Papes, in a moment when the artists, scientists, activists, and intellectuals invited by the curators will share eighty questions about the present and the future with the audience. The entire edition is devoted to asking questions — poetic, political, intimate, and collective, through theater or choreography, in French or in Korean (this year’s guest language) — and the strength of this festival, born in the postwar years, lies precisely in its ability to bring together and put into dialogue a plurality of voices, perspectives, and forms of creativity. Speaking of Korean, Daria Deflorian will premiere (after previews in Toulouse on Sunday and Monday) her new stage adaptation of “We Do Not Part,” the novel by Nobel laureate Han Kang, who will also be present at the festival. Other notable productions include “La parabole du seum” by playwright and actress Rébecca Chaillon, part dystopian tale inspired by Octavia E. Butler, part religious poem, performed entirely by a cast of fat actors, and the final chapter of “Cadela Força,” the trilogy by Brazilian artist Carolina Bianchi and the collective Cara de Cavalo, staged as a marathon together with the trilogy’s other two chapters.
JULY 17-26. KALAMATA INTERNATIONAL DANCE FESTIVAL / KALAMATA, GREECE
Dancing to seek out (and lose) one’s balance
In capoeira, one of the fundamental lessons is learning how to fall. Letting go instead of resisting, keeping your center of gravity low and mobile so you can absorb impact with elasticity and grace (knowing how to fall is the first step toward being able to get back up — a fairly obvious but accurate metaphor for being in the world). The natural condition of capoeira, often described as the warrior’s dance and the dancer’s fight, is precisely this unstable balance. Dance as an expression of human instability and the constant search for balance is the theme running through the 32nd edition of the Kalamata International Dance Festival, the leading contemporary dance festival in Greece, directed by choreographer Tzeni Argyriou, and the only one directly funded by the state. The festival explores the role dance can play today in connecting us to the present and offering us tools to think, express ourselves, imagine, and dream. This year’s productions all embrace the uncertainty of existence and conjure up magical spaces, times, and worlds. Speaking of magic, among them is “Tempo,” born from a collaboration between choreographer Fernando Melo and magician and visual artist Kalle Nio. Through a dialogue between illusionism and dance, the show explores the perception of time — its acceleration, deceleration, suspension — in short, the experience of time itself, already an illusion to begin with — a magic act far removed from the kind of imagery that pictures magicians and illusionists as belonging to a distinctly uncool Comic-Con world.
JULY 3, 2026-MARCH 14, 2027. [MATERIALISTIN]. MATTER OF CARE, CARE OF MATTER / BERLIN, GERMANY
Understanding the world by getting your hands into it
At the Hamburger Bahnhof–Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, “[materialistin]. Matter of Care, Care of Matter” opens: a group exhibition by women artists from Leipzig — a feminist, social, and political collective — who typically explore their ideas through sculpture. Transforming materials such as stone, clay, concrete, plaster, steel, plants, and salvaged materials, but also light and language, into sculptures and site-specific installations is, for them, the starting point for tracing intimate reflections on memory, coexistence, and humanity’s relationship with the world. To understand the world, we have to get our hands into it.
