la nef des fols (2024) by cie. toula limnaios returned to the company’s own HALLE Tanzbühne Berlin from 24 September to 4 October 2025. The choreography sought to embody a well-known allegory’s tension between order and delirium.
Entering HALLE Tanzbühne, I found an alluring scene already set. Two large sails defined the space, one strung horizontally upstage like a hammock, the other rising vertically as if to catch wind. Mist hovered, light washed through. Faded pictograms of stick figures from the hall’s sporting past were still visible, stencilled across the wall: basketball, table tennis, and other games. I saw a visual correspondence between these symbols and the numbers printed on the sails, suggesting (albeit inadvertently) a relation between measurement, instruction, and motion. I lingered on this interplay—the rune-like quality of signs as quantities, directives, gestures—before the dance began. The performance that followed didn’t sustain this initial relational curiosity.
Drawing on the medieval allegory of the ‘ship of fools’—popularised by Sebastian Brant (1494) and later reinterpreted by Foucault—the work sailed through familiar questions of madness and reason. The themes reminded me of Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022): a literal ship of fools, a biting satire of capitalist vanity and class collapse.
Unlike Östlund’s film, which wielded irony and intelligence, I felt this performance merely mirrored its own confusion. The dancers displayed strong technique—their yielding, rebounding energy carving space—but despite their capacities for precision and specificity, the work remained monotonous. Phases blurred together without transformation: a flat continuum, skilful, yet dramaturgically unsupported. André Lepecki’s critique in Exhausting Dance (2006) of “the totalitarian impetus of the kinetic-representational machine” came to mind: movement as compulsion rather than inquiry. The performers’ tone remained serious, unmodulated; their expressions were choreographed into paralysis. Performativity was confined to a single channel, devoid of interaction with the live situation. It felt as though the material would unfold identically whether or not it had an audience—structurally produced, not energetically emergent.
The soundscape—cinematic strings, processed drum effects—commented on the action, evoking pirate-film atmospheres without irony. Costumes hinted at a “period” aesthetic in earthy cottons, somewhere between rustic fantasy and Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings. Lighting offered the most intrigue, as dancers weaved through side-light patches or illuminated one another with handheld torches. Yet even this play of light failed to shift tone. In effect—motion illustrated.
In the final scene, three men of the ensemble of eight dancers remained: one pulled a white T-shirt over his face, spitting red liquid while convulsing; another scrambled inside the upstage sail; a third, in a black hoodie, dragged two more hoodies across the floor, grimacing and contorting. After sixty-five minutes, I was left asking: what had happened? A company of skilled dancers earnestly performed extended unison phrases recalling early-2000s dance theatre, interspersed with rope play, aerial tricks, and duets. By the end, one seemed to be dying of consumption or had just cannibalised the rest of the group, another drowning, octopus-esque. Although intense, this ending wasn’t enough to coalesce the work into a meaningful proposal toward experience.
la nef des fols (2024) by cie. toula limnaios was shown at HALLE Tanzbühne Berlin from 24 September to 4 October 2025.
