Bengaluru gears up for LURU, city’s first Screendance Festival
Bengaluru will host its first-ever Screendance Festival from September 12 to 19. The first edition of LURU Screendance Festival 2026 is presented by Vishwakiran Nambi Dance Company in collaboration with Choreoscope Barcelona Dance Film Festival. It is conceived and curated by dancer-choreographer Vishwakiran Nambi.
The festival aims to build a dialogue between dance and cinema and explore “what happens when choreography begins to exist through cinema.””When a body enters a film, it does not merely carry dance from the stage to the screen. The camera alters space, the edit reshapes time, and framing, sound, light and movement operate as parts of a single choreographic language,” Nambi said.
The festival opens at Suchitra Cinema and Cultural Academy with the screening of 12 short films, ranging from four to 15 minutes, by independent dance-filmmakers from the U.S., Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Czechia and other countries.
“While most films are on contemporary dance, we do have one film on Indian classical dance,” Nambi said, noting that there is no particular theme this year as it is LURU’s debut. The evening will also feature the inaugural LURU awards.
