The Butterfly Who Flew Into The Rave

Award-winning contemporary dance from Aotearoa/New Zealand, one of the hits of Edinburgh 2025. Created by Oli Mathiesen with Lucy Lynch and Sharvon Mortimer and inspired by the energy and emotion of rave culture, it’s a spectacle of stamina, sweat, and sheer willpower performed to a pulsating soundtrack of techno, house and more by Detroit DJ Suburban Knight’s album Nocturbulous Behaviour.

Oli Mathiesen has described it as “an endurance-based dance work” that “embraces the movement vocabulary of techno and rave culture, creating a contemporary nightclub experience expressed through three bodies … We like to think of it as a three-day rave condensed into 60 minutes of relentless, seamless movement, perfectly synced to every beat … The piece taps into that primal need to keep going, keep pushing, and chase more – no matter the cost”.

It runs Thursday to Saturday, 10 to 12 September. Each performance will be followed by a short dance party, with audiences invited to stay for DJ sets by Dubai’s very cool Analog Room.