This year, The Artists Are Present carries the subtitle: And Have No Shame.

This edition invites audiences to fully immerse themselves in the shamelessness of the performers. Shame on stage is not a weakness, but a sign that something real is taking place. Performers present their bodies as they are: powerful and vulnerable. In a world that distrusts their art, they declare it necessary. Dancing bodies reach out to one another, resist war, question gender, and enter into relationships with AI. They follow intuition as a radical choice — to resist and to surprise, here and now.

Be surprised by works from Thais Di Marco, whose Bird of Paradise places dancers on the pole between grace and gravity; Lucinda Wessels, with the physically layered duet Fluid Figures; Liza Sulaiman, who in Body: (not) Found reflects on bodies within an unjust world; and Emio Greco & Pieter C. Scholten, who bring back WE, the SHAMELESS, the heated “solo for two” that shamelessly exposes inner division.

Also on view is Intuition Machine by ICK Collective: where AI knows no shame, raw dance data becomes human and alive.