There are so many dance festivals across Europe during the summer—in every major city and many minor ones—that you could spend the whole three months bopping from one festival to another and still have enough for next year. What’s surprising and gratifying—and argues for taking this vacation fantasy seriously—is how little the offerings overlap. Each locale stakes out its own territory—geographically, thematically, stylistically, even demographically. For the first half of July, Julidans “spreads like an oil slick through Amsterdam,” the organizers say with the same cheerful impolitesse that characterizes the shows themselves. Usually festivals that advertise “mavericks who push the limits. Of forms, and sometimes of good taste as well,” don’t deliver, and those that deliver don’t tell you. But in keeping with Amsterdam’s reputation for free- and forward-thinking, Julidans does what it says because it says. It commits to thinking its ideals through to the practicalities. For example, the festival makes the smart, unfashionable move of favoring choreographers at mid-career: not beginners nor the long-hailed but the hungry and accomplished, on the cusp. This year that means, for starters, Christos Papadopoulos’s My Fierce Ignorant Step, which supposedly transmits “the waves of collective memories” through microcosmic shifts in the dancing. A big claim, yet the Greek choreographer’s last work, which won Sadler’s Wells’ prestigious Rose competition this year, succeeded in a similar maneuver. While Papadopoulos choreographs even the eyeballs, the breath, his compatriot Ioannis Mandafounis, who is all over this year’s Julidans, demonstrates a new hybrid of improvisational and set choreography on a double bill with honorary mid-careerist William Forsythe for the Dresden Frankfurt company. And for the kind of cringe-inducing participatory performance that makes me suspect she’s onto something, the aging Icelander Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir invites other menopausal women onstage to move their haplessly sweaty bodies and bare their brave and weary hearts. —Apollinaire Scherr