“What will be the roar of the 2020s?” asks Pontus Lidberg, the Swedish director of Danish Dance Theatre, the largest contemporary-dance troupe in Denmark. Roaring Twenties, Lidberg’s final work for the company after five years at its helm, premieres tonight in Copenhagen. “We have seen a few roars this decade—Black Lives Matter, the coronavirus and all that came with it. There were a lot of roars in the 1920s, and look how that turned out.”
Despite cursory nods to the original 20s—a sparse set punctuated by bistro chairs, costumes with the hint of a flapper’s hem—audiences won’t be subjected to banal historical comparisons between the decades. “I like to leave question marks rather than give trite conclusions,” says Lidberg. “The one parallel is that both the 1920s and the 2020s are times of immense change and great uncertainty.”
