THE SUMMER SACRIFICE

Het Zomeroffer (The Summer Sacrifice) is a bold and radical summer performance by De Warme Winkel, inspired by Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. In the original, a young woman dances herself to death as a ritual offering to usher in the spring. De Warme Winkel reimagines this primal sacrifice for our time—turning it into a powerful reflection on our collective addiction to the car. In this contemporary rite, audience members are invited to voluntarily surrender their own vehicles to be sacrificed as part of the performance. The result is a poetic, provocative, and deeply physical confrontation with letting go—and it was met with wide acclaim in the press.

In a society where the car is still king, this project asks: what if quitting wasn’t just practical, but sacred? Through a collective farewell to the automobile, this performance invites us to confront our dependency with drama, grief, joy—and the courage to stop.

Modern Western life teaches us how to acquire, accelerate, and upgrade—but rarely how to pause, release, or surrender. We lack rituals for letting go. De Zomerslachtoffer fills this void by staging a symbolic sacrifice: not of people, but of habits. It’s a space where mourning meets transformation, where the personal becomes political. Because breaking with car culture is not just a technical challenge, but a cultural one.

In many traditions, rites of passage mark transitions with meaning and community. In the West, we’ve outsourced that wisdom to markets and machines. This performance restores something ancient: the power of ritual to mark change, to ground grief, and to spark renewal. If we are serious about climate, justice, and livability, we must not only build new systems—but learn how to end the old ones, together.

This story couldn’t be more urgent. As we search for ways to move toward a society less dependent on cars, De Warme Winkel’s bold performance The Summer Sacrifice offers a powerful, imaginative leap forward. That’s why the Lab and its partners are now raising funds to create a documentary in 2025 that captures this remarkable project—its vision, its impact, and the people who dared to let go.

We invite you to be part of this journey. Your donation will help bring this story to the screen—and spark conversations far beyond the theatre. Every contribution counts.

All pictures courtesy of @DeWarmeWinkel and @SofieKnijf