Always a Threat: Young Boy Dancing Group

A dance piece has never scared me. They may have grossed me out or released euphoric endorphins, but I’ve never felt like something bad might happen just by being there. That is until I saw Young Boy Dancing Group in a warehouse on the outskirts of Warsaw, where the Zurich-based group threw chairs at one another, walked in each other’s mouths, and shot lasers out of their asses at the audience’s eye level. None of this made me really worried, I just felt a latent sense of threat. But when the cast started to tear apart the contents of garbage cans from the impromptu bar and started to disperse them, I did start wondering where this would end. Though choreographed, their performance at Ephemera—one of Europe’s most carefully-curated and compelling festivals (masterminded by Unsound’s directors)—was anarchy. And I loved it.

Founded in 2014, the experimental performance and dance collective has performed at major international festivals and venues for more than a decade. Recently, they were also tapped by Madonna for her project Confessions II. And despite Young Boy Dancing Group shunning the press, I emailed with them about their origins and principles for this exclusive interview.

Shane Anderson: Could you tell me about the origins of the name? Why not work under your real names?

Young Boy Dancing Group: There is a book called Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by Tiqqun which is where the young girl reading group took their name from. YGRG was a nomadic, feminist-inspired performance and reading collective run by Egle Kulbokaite and Dorota Gawęda. We were a group without a name at that time, so ybdg became the pendant to ygrg. Consensually.

SA: Do you always work with local dancers? Why?

YBDG: At the end of the day YBDG is a social sculpture in which we connect people. Collaborating with locals is essential for social, financial, and ecological reasons.

SA: One thing I really admired was that afterwards I could name 6 images from the show, which is a lot (sometimes I can only remember maybe one scene). Do you work towards creating these moments or do they happen organically? I guess I'd like to know more about your working process.

YBDG: What we create touches us, everything comes from an emotional space out of a reaction to socio-political issues we witness. Our low tolerance for boredom while working brings us to levels we really believe in. So, if we get bored of repeating ourselves, we remix our own work until we feel it’s relevant again.

SA: How much of the work was choreographed?

YBDG: Many details are precisely choreographed; it takes us between 6 months and 1 hour for one scene to be prepared and choreographed.

SA: There was something really thrilling about the show because it also felt dangerous. I'm thinking of the chairs being thrown for instance. Is going to extremes important for all the work or just this show?

YBDG: Collective energy often pushes the situation beyond something polished or safe-looking. The trance state brings the performer to a divine experience. But while we are totally consumed by the situation, we are also in total control, even if it can look like dangerous or volatile to an outside eye.

SA: I'd also be interested in learning more about the music and the set and the costumes.

YBDG: Every element and the way we treat it attempts to resist capitalistic modes of production and escape certain institutional logics. We do not buy new clothes. The garments we wear also have their own logic and cycle, from how we get them to how we style them and we use them for another performances or archive them into physical works like our series of epoxy wall works, which distil the energy of the performances into static objects, like relics—which we’ve shown with galleries such as NEVEN, London.

Music-wise, we have worked closely with London-based Oxhy and Paris-based Ange Halliwell, as well with Cel Genesis, Ssaliva, Marcel Dune, Evita Manji, Abssys and KG. Helm.

Recently, we started to produce and perform our own music in the shows.

SA: Tell me about Madonna.

YBDG: Well, that was an iconic collaboration. Thanks to Torso for doing such a great job!

Images YBDG with An Szopa, Emma Szumlas, Kuba Stepien, Nica Roses, Maria Metsalu, Manu Anima.

Ephemera festival, Warsaw, 2026