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Every year on April 29, we celebrate the International Dance Day. This date has been selected by UNESCO in 1982 for it is the birthday of Jean Georges Noverre, the creator of modern ballet and one of the greatest reformers in the history of dance.

Dance day is marked in numerous countries, and every culture celebrates it in a particular and unique manner and international messages are written and read by people who are truly living for dance.

This year's international message was written by dancer and choreographer Mikhail Barishnikov:

It’s often said that dance can express the unspeakable. Joy, grief, and despair become visible;

embodied expressions of our shared fragility. In this, dance can awaken empathy, inspire

kindness, and spark a desire to heal rather than harm.

Especially now—as hundreds of thousands endure war, navigate political upheaval, and rise in

protest against injustice—honest reflection is vital. It’s a heavy burden to place on the body, on

dance, on art. Yet art is still the best way to give form to the unspoken, and we can begin by

asking ourselves: Where is my truth? How do I honor myself and my community? Whom do I

answer to?

The author of the Croatian message is Andreja Jeličić, ballet pedagogue and theoretician

The dancing of young children is pure joy. The dancing of us grown-ups, adults can also be joyful. It can mean giving in to the rhythms of the body and music, waking up the inner being who can be merry, wise and sometimes even sensual. With dance we can connect – delve into the rhythm of a group and take root in the community or we can run away from everything and find oblivion in dance. Dancing for us adults can also be a profession. It is our job, hard work and our living. We investigate it and describe it, analyse it and write it down, we construct it and deconstruct it, train it endlessly and perfect it. Dancing is a serious matter. With it we can teach and educate, for dance, for life. We can heal with dance. Today, when the epochal dance of death and violence, the new barbaric Pyrrhic dance is choreographed by old men obsessed with power, dragging into it entire countries and nations and when the deafening tapping of millions of keyboards and the heavy humming of “smart” machines systematically distract us, take our will and embodiment – dance (be)comes a resistance movement. Dancing today is for the bold.

Dance. Alone and with others. Dance consciously and with intent, passionately, contemplatively, with love. Just dance.