In our HIDDEN projects, we explore underrepresented communities, cultures, or contexts. Through exchange projects with professional groups and local communities, we engage with new perspectives. This mutual exchange between our own culture, knowledge, and skills and those of others is our foundation: ‘Each One Teach One’. Each year, we select a new social theme—such as inequality of opportunities, urban and rural dynamics, climate, or grief processing—that suits the location and community we are working with. The stories and encounters we gather are shared with a broader audience in a new creative form each year, such as dance, music, film, paper, or text.
From these exchanges, we gain:
–> Substantive preliminary research for our annual performance
–> Insights to share with our team (which often participates)
–> Knowledge to share with young people in our immediate environment
–> Material for a growing archive of intangible heritage
An example of a previous exchange project, HIDDEN_Katlehong 2023, was about inequality of opportunity.
You can view the online exhibition of that exchange in the NITE hotel here:
Each year, we produce at least one major performance, featuring multiple dancers, composers, or singers and incorporating elements such as music, film, photography, and fashion. The theme and form of the production are inspired by the stories and experiences we gather from HIDDEN. We tour this work across small venues throughout the Netherlands and strive to bring the performance back to the community we engaged with through HIDDEN. Previous HIDDEN projects have taken place all over the Netherlands, as well as in South Africa and Italy.