Migros Culture Percentage Dance Festival Steps:
Contemporary Dance Across Switzerland

Steps is a biennial dance festival organized by Migros Culture Percentage that showcases outstanding work in contemporary dance. Over the course of four weeks the festival transforms Switzerland into a platform for contemporary dance featuring performances by national and international companies. Steps would not be possible without the close cooperation of our partner stages.

Steps stands for stylistic diversity and excellence. Diversity and inclusion occupy centre stage in our program. We emphasize socially relevant topics and support innovative approaches to dance. Aside from inviting companies and artists, the festival also actively supports artistic creation and has co-produced countless works that premiered in the context of the biennale.

Aside from dance performances, Steps also organizes a supplementary program of selected formats intended to provide audiences with different access to dance and to offer members of the Swiss dance scene further means for creative development.

As Switzerland’s largest dance festival, Steps organizes dance performances on stages across the entire country. We work closely with our partner theatres and touring companies to reduce ecologically harmful emissions as much as possible. Since 2021 we have been developing and implementing specific measures to increase the ecological sustainability of the festival.

Our partner companies perform on a diverse range of stages, including large city theatres, alternative cultural institutions, and local multi-purpose venues. The unique structure of the festival makes dance accessible to a broad Swiss public, including people with disability. We have been a label partner of “Kultur inklusiv” since 2018 and encourage accessible practices among our event-partner community.

Since the festival’s inception in 1988, Steps has developed a network consisting of nearly forty Swiss dance and theatre institutions as well as other parties that connects dance practitioners with event organizers and has consistently been initiating co-productions in various contexts and formats.