Trevoga Collective – Xx-63 premiere

The Excavation of Recession Pop: Trevoga’s XX-63 Prepares for World Premiere at Julidans.

Prepare to enter a visceral dreamscape of scroll loops, synthetic lust, and haunted consumerist ruins as Trevoga, the Eastern European performance label founded by choreographer Neda Ruzheva, premieres its highly anticipated new work XX-63 at Julidans, one of the world’s most influential contemporary dance festivals. Following its pre-premiere at One Dance Festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, this immersive, genre-defying piece positions Trevoga as one of the most urgent voices in experimental performance today.

Trevoga means anxiety
Trevoga is not a collective—it is a pressure point in the cultural landscape, a vessel for embodied anxiety in an overstimulated world. Rooted in the zeitgeist and ephemerality of recession pop aesthetics, club culture, and post-digital fatigue, Trevoga turns societal collapse into choreographic form. Their work is known for its raw sensuality, brutal poetry, and a refusal to anesthetize the present moment. Anxiety is not theme but material; choreography not metaphor but symptom.

The name itself means anxiety in Bulgarian. Drawing influence from underground rave rituals, post-Y2K nostalgia, and the collapse of meaning in the digital age, Trevoga treats the stage as a dissection table for 21st-century identity. “The capitalist body,” Ruzheva writes, “is not a temple—it’s an abandoned shopping mall.” Their dancers don’t perform; they convulse, shimmer, and leak under the pressure of overproduction and fractured desire.

After debuting with the award-winning 11 3 8 7, which earned the Best of Fringe Amsterdam award, a spot in Aerowaves Twenty24, and a Top 5 listing in NRC’s Best Dance of the Dutch Season 2023/2024, Trevoga’s follow-up XX-63 arrives as a seizure of sense—a bold escalation in the collective’s mission to embody the fractured beauty and dread of now.

Neda Ruzheva

Neda Ruzheva, born in Sofia, Bulgaria, encountered contemporary dance at age 8. By 17, she was the youngest student ever admitted to the choreography program at the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam. After graduating, she continued her studies at the Sandberg Institute and founded Trevoga in 2023 alongside a group of Eastern European artists, rejecting hierarchical dance models and embracing a horizontal, co-creative process.

Neda’s choreography blends academic rigor with subcultural grit. Her work fuses theory, sculpture, industrial sound, and intense physicality to probe the commodification of desire, the aesthetics of decay, and the longing buried beneath algorithmic alienation. Her trajectory—from Bulgarian break battles in her early youth to European mainstages—symbolizes a broader generational movement: to reclaim vulnerability as resistance, and to use the body as a site of critique and communion.

XX-63

Trevoga’s second major production, XX-63, is a multidisciplinary descent into the fractured affect of Gen Z—a choreographic hallucination shaped by pop trauma, endless scrolling, and techno-desire. Described by its creators as a “waiting room in a dystopian fantasy,” the piece explores themes of saturation, escape, and the violent choreography of craving.

Developed with co-director and dramaturg Nikola Stoyanov—a philosopher of technology and theorist of cybergothic infrastructures—XX-63 is not linear, but cyclical: movement stutters, loops, and collapses like a corrupted file. The production is brought to life through key artistic partners in design and sound. The Hague-based art duo Alagya, who designed a futuristic, sculptural stage environment that both challenges the performers and pulls the audience into a charged, liminal space. The sonic world of the piece is shaped by Sueuga, a composer and sound designer known for their immersive installations at institutions such as MASS MoCA and Café Oto. Their score blends abrasive industrial textures with flickers of soft nostalgia—distorted drums, Y2K shimmer, and ambient dread.

Designer wear for the project was selected and manipulated by David R. Siepman from his collection Dragen. Styling was advised and facilitated through the vision of up-and-coming creative Michalina Górnik.

The title itself references both psalm 63, a cry for transcendent satisfaction, and “XX,” a synthetic kiss or the name of an unknown drug. It is a symbol of manufactured desire and digital addiction, where all sensation is distorted into spectacle. In this world, nothing decomposes—pleasure is processed and repackaged, grief algorithmically delayed.

First presented as a preview at One Dance Festival 2025 in Plovdiv—a homecoming of sorts for Ruzheva—XX-63 now prepares for its world premiere at Julidans in Amsterdam, where Trevoga will become the first Bulgarian-led performance to be co-produced by the festival in its history.

XX-63’s structure and design allows it to morph across theatrical, gallery, and site-specific spaces, exemplifying a new direction for contemporary choreography: intimate yet explosive, speculative yet grounded, fractured but deeply human. Its world premiere at Julidans will be followed by an international tour.

The people at Trevoga have kindly offered a limited amount of free tickets for Subbacultcha members. Please make a reservation before 10 June 23.59 CET  by sending an email to mailinglist@subbacultcha.nl with Trevoga in the subject line + your name in the email.

Not a member yet? Sign up now to attend this and all other events on our programme for free.