Winner of the Swan Award for Most Impressive Dance Production of 2025.
Connor Schumacher’s techno-jazz musical *Raging Against Various Elements* (R.A.V.E.) is about building your family—with every single heartbeat. R.A.V.E., which won Connor the prestigious Swan Award for Most Impressive Dance Production of 2025, is raw, dark, unfiltered, and brimming with a zest for life. For seven years, grief, love, pain, and death danced together; now, it is time to fight for life.

R.A.V.E. takes you through deep valleys and ecstatic highs. For Connor, the past few years have been a journey through loss and heartbreak. In R.A.V.E., he tells that story on the dance floor. With the help of visual artists Boris Acket and Elsemarijn Bruijs, he created a space that not only moves but pulsates with life. Mirrors distort; lights shift. In this setting, six professional ravers push the boundaries of what dance can be, set to the beats of Pascal Pinkert (DJ Europarking).

Pinkert blends techno with jazz to create a sound that resonates deep within you.
*Raging Against Various Elements* is about reclaiming your life on the dance floor. Every step is an opportunity to take back control. From the jury report by the VSCD, which presents the ‘Zwanen’ (Swan Awards) annually: “The jury finds it deeply encouraging that Schumacher shares, in such a liberating way, the full potential of what dance can achieve. Through an infectious interplay of dance idioms drawn from jazz dance and the club scene, *R.A.V.E.* celebrates life via the dancing body within a close-knit group of friends. The almost-living set design by Boris Acket and Elsemarijn Bruijs serves as a powerful additional performer in this context.”

Connor Schumacher / ARK
Connor Schumacher is a dance artist, choreographer, and artistic director of the ARK foundation. Through this foundation, he creates raves, movement classes, and performances. Connor studied dance in New York and is affiliated with Dansateliers Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where he developed as a dance artist. He is passionate about getting people moving: Society would be better if we danced everyday.