About the work
"GRIMM" is a joint production by Marco Gerris, artistic director of the hip-hop collective ISH Dance Collective, and Ernst Meisner, artistic director of Dutch National Ballet's Junior Company. The piece takes the best-known fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm as its starting point and mixes them into a bold, entertaining dance spectacle that fuses hip-hop and classical ballet. The music is by Robin Rimbaud (Scanner). Originally created in 2018 at the Nationale Opera & Ballet in Amsterdam, "GRIMM" was revived in a revised form in 2026 and toured the Netherlands.
Plot
"GRIMM" interweaves the most famous Grimm fairy tales into a collage-like, fast-paced performance for all ages. Rather than a single plot, it builds a round-dance of familiar fairy-tale motifs that embraces both the dark and the playful sides of the originals, recast through the meeting of two dance languages – the energy and groundedness of hip-hop and the precision of classical ballet. The young dancers of the Junior Company encounter the street-dance tradition of ISH Dance Collective, and from that encounter emerges a visually striking, high-energy family show.
Cultural significance
"GRIMM" exemplifies the successful fusion of classical ballet and urban dance that ISH and the Junior Company have cultivated for years. The piece makes dance theatre accessible to a broad, including young, audience and shows that hip-hop and ballet – as critics repeatedly concluded – make a "golden duo". As a cross-generational family show it contributes to Dutch National Ballet's talent development and audience building, underlining its openness to crossover formats.