The Dance Review Portal – Current Critiques of Berlin Dance Events
Johanna Ackva
revolves in her artistic practice around the interactions between physical and metaphysical movements. Her works on paper and in performative spaces address the relationships between body and thought, the living and the dead, the world and perception. As a choreographer, dancer, lecturer, author and curator, she is mainly active in Berlin. In the Uckermark (Brandenburg), she runs the Libken thinking and production space as part of a team of four.
With Goodbye Berlin (premiere on October 2025, showing this season at the Volksbühne at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz), the choreographer Constanza Macras seems to be bidding more than a metaphorical goodbye to Berlin.
With Goodbye Berlin (premiere on October 2025, showing this season at the Volksbühne at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz), the choreographer Constanza Macras seems to be bidding more than a metaphorical goodbye to Berlin.
For their latest piece, for the time being (premiere on 10 March 2026 at Radialsystem), Sasha Waltz and Guests worked with the improvisation principles of Authentic Movement and Deep Listening.
On 11 February 2026, Musicology and Dance Studies students shared the results of their research with artist Pol Pi on the idea of listening as a conscious act of connection at the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts).
the intimacy of collision by Lebanese choreographer Dominique Tegho celebrated its premiere during the 30th anniversary of Tanztage Berlin (8 to 24 January 2026) at the Sophiensæle. A review of the second performance on 18 January 2026.
Manon Parent and Alma Palacios have been fixated on the author, actress, and resistance fighter Goliarda Sapienza for years. Autobiography of Contradictions (5-7 December 2025, Dock11) is a homage to her.
With the solo performance of DJAM LEELII, a Necroromantic (5-9 November 2025, sophiensaele), Djibril Sall created a ritual that conjured up memories of the ocean for all those who have lost their lives in its torrents.
magicians in bed is about interpreting bed creases. During the Unrenewable Energies festival (15 September – 17 October 2025, Uferstudios), Jeanne Eschert introduced a practice that is otherwise relegated to our homes and mostly to people who rarely leave their beds.
On 15 August 2025 during Tanz im August, Tournament, a collaboration between choreographer Adam Linder, composer Ethan Braun, and the solo ensemble Kaleidoskop, celebrated its premiere – a theatrical battle of symbols.
From 8-13 July 2025, Angela Vitovec, aka Angela Schubot, and a mixed ensemble of performers from Theater Thikwa and the independent dance scene will once again showcase Ya!, a performance created in collaboration with yarrow in 2024.
On three evenings (12-13 June 2025), six students from the MA Solo Dance and Authorship (SoDA) at the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT) present their ongoing research projects. This article reflects on two of these presentations.
On 16 May 2025 at the Forum Theatertreffen 1965-2025 in the foyer of the Berliner Festspiele, choreographer Carolina Mendonça offered insight into Something Is Approaching, a new piece that will celebrate its premiere in June.
Since November 2024, choreographer Mel Brinkmann has been meeting with seven young dancers once a week in Mädchen*zentrum Szenenwechsel. The result is Divas, an expressive dance performance performed from 11 to 13 April 2025 at Uferstudios.
Wo alle sind (Where everyone is) is a poetic ritual that explores the practice of (de)scribing and, in the process, the public square in front of Galerie Wedding. From 28 February to 28 March 2025, Adam Man will be sitting on a bench in the gallery from 3-4pm sharing his observations with visitors to the exhibit.
Integrated audio descriptions (AD) are currently being “more intensely developed and perceived” as an artistic medium, says blind author Pernille Sonne. “We don’t want this newly opened door to greater inclusivity to close again.”
For a third time, the duet, We Are (Nothing) Everything, by Makisig Akin and Anya Cloud was performed in Berlin (16-19 January 2025, DOCK11). Rightly so!, according to the author of this article, who has rarely experienced such a captivated audience.
Encounters between one member each of the ensembles Dance On and Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop set the stage for the performance A Sky Like A Wall, which premiered on 29 November 2024 in the Berlinische Galerie.
Claire Cunningham moves through the theater space, with and without a staff/crutches, a wayfarer, as she simultaneously embarks on a metaphorical journey through life in Songs of the Wayfarer (14-16 November 2024, NO LIMITS Festival).
In a hurry? Hinter uns der Nebel(The Fog Behind Us) could change that. On 13 October 2024, the collective Here we are,with its interdisciplinary project, once again invites us to a space where time moves differently. The venue is the Alte Neuendorfer Church in Babelsberg.
The graduates of the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) showcased their final pieces from 18-26 September 2024. Although they don’t fall into one category, I find that they are all a reflection of our time – a time spinning around in circles.
In the multimedia performance Anatomorphoses (20-23 June 24, DOCK 11 EDEN) Penelope Wehrli and herteam have future people and fleeting nebulous entities dance – in the hope of changing our self-awareness and perception of the world.
For Floating Roots (9 – 12 May 2024, Tanzfabrik, revival), Inky Lee interviewed 17 1.5 and 2nd generation Asian and queer immigrants. Six of them are together on stage with two Deaf performers.
I am looking at a stage that is never still. There is a constant coming and going. Someone is always running in a circle, with thumping steps. Someone else is moving, slowly creeping, also in a circle, in the opposite direction. Or from one corner to another. Or around another person, without losing sight of them. I look left, then right, then left again. I try to grasp what is happening, what seems like soberly performed movements that appear aimless. Endless light changes immerse everything in blue, then pink, then yellow, blue, pink, yellow, etc.
The restlessness on stage washes over me like a wave. Along with a collage of accounts of migration, discrimination, loneliness and the feeling of neither belonging to the “old” nor the “new homeland”, which are the soundtrack of the piece, the performance makes me feel increasingly fatigued. And yet, this state of exhaustion probably does not even come close to how the gruelling process of years of fighting for asylum or the constant confrontation with sometimes crude and at other times subtle racist statements actually feels. I am spared all that as a white woman in Germany. Tonight, I am invited to witness the stories of those who are not able to take root anywhere and perhaps understand a bit of their rootlessness and restlessness.
It touches on, for example, how parents send their eight week old child to Shanghai with its grandmother so they can work in Germany. Because there is no time to take care of a child. Or a teenager who stands in front of a mirror kneading its face in the hopes of achieving a smaller nose and larger eyes. Inky Lee’s performers, who are the source of some of these stories, are on stage for the first time and only for this piece. Bound by a neon yellow rope, they move towards one another in shifting constellations. Connections are made, stretched to their limits, and cut off. Groups arise and peter out. For long stretches of the piece, I find it hard to connect what they are doing with what I am hearing. But then there are also those moments during which the precarious constellations of bodies, like a family constellation, correlate with the narratives blaring over the loudspeaker or enter into a productive, inharmonious relationship. Moments which I would have liked to see more of.
Sometimes the voices from the tape falter and burst into tears. One of the two Deaf performers, who are able to express with their faces and expressive gestures that which cannot be put into words, catches my attention. It now becomes clear to me that the archive of experiences of queer people from the Asian diaspora goes far beyond what can be shared today. To that end, Floating Roots is perhaps not a conclusion, but rather the beginning of a process.
The stand-up comedy Baby I’m Sick Tonight will make you laugh and cry. Ahead of the premiere (April 25, 2024, Sophiensaele), I spoke with the choreographer Olivia Hyunsin Kim about chronic illness and the shortcomings when it comes to dealing with it.
With New Report On Giving Birth (6 + 7 March 2024, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU2)), Chinese choreographer and dancer Wen Hui builds on her piece Report On Giving Birth presented 20 years ago. Together with three dancers, she takes stock: what has changed for childbearing bodies since then? What has not?
The PURPLE – International Dance Festival for Young Audiences (20th – 28th January) opened on Saturday, 20th January, 2024 with Chotto Desh, a moving solo about the biography of dancer and choreographer Akram Khan.
In Solo for Boy, which premiered at Dock11 on 11.1.2024, choreographer Sasha Amaya in dialogue with dancer Félix Deepen, works her way through Western representations of male beauty in art, fashion and pop culture.
The interdisciplinary evening Terrestrial Transit asks how we can embrace the earthly and finite transition of being as a way of life. With five performances at DOCK11 until December 9, 2023, the company Cranky Bodies concludes a nomadic project that began in Berlin and led via Brandenburg and the border town of Szczecin to the Baltic Sea.
The series Fold (Tanzfabrik) ends the year with works concerned with ghosts and demons. In The Multiplicity of the Other shown from the 30.11 until 2.12.2023, Ixchel Mendoza Hernández dwells on the Other as a ghostly presence in one’s own body.
