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.
I’ve been biking past posters announcing this farewell for weeks now. “Goodbye Berlin”, and underneath (you almost want to read, “yours”) “Constanza Macras”. It reads like a succinct, pointedly indifferent goodbye. And perhaps that’s also how it’s meant. This season is Constanza Macras’ last as the in-house choreographer at the Volksbühne, and the longer her cabaret-style account of the city goes on, the more I suspect that Macras is probably long gone. That she has left Berlin for greener pastures and is somewhere secretly laughing at us as we, now on the fifth pole dance scene and the 67th ass crack thrust in our faces, suffer through the most merciless depiction of Berlin ever made.
Melted into one portrait are the Berlin of the 1920s to 30s as well as that of the city today as seen from Macras’ point of view, a limbo of sorts in which addicts on the prowl for sex, excess, and self-discovery spend their nights mindlessly partying while fascism takes over the reins from right underneath them. If you ask me, this pretty much explains the idea behind the piece. However, Macras is clearly not sure whether we’ve all really understood it. She relays the same message what feels like ten times. Although in each iteration – sometimes in a minimalist leather strap harness and other times in a sequined retro outfit – another pole, aka phallus, aka golden lamb is being spun around. The old-testament comparison is not unintentional. Just like the bible, this piece serves up an unpleasant blend of moral finger-wagging with a semi-pornographic obsession as well as the unnecessary details of what it is portraying as immoral. Why do I have to see a guy spraying fake urine into another guy’s face? If I’m interested in the combination of sex and urine, there are enough places where I can see exactly that without paying for a ticket. While the reenactment on stage reduces the scenes it is depicting to something deviant and laughable, I as the viewer am expected to simultaneously drool and feel shame.
I can hardly believe that this was Macras’ intention. But her warning – depicted in every scene in the piece – against a shift to the right, where we are sliding under sedation from party drugs and blinded by lust, conveys a position that I’ve encountered before. Namely, the theory that the liberal left, with its “minority politics”, has gone so far that mainstream society “is no longer following” and, as a consequence, is being lost to the right. A theory which I not only find questionable but also dangerous since it obscures the economic reasons for the crisis facing our democracy and plays people and their differences, though not necessarily incompatible values and desires, against one another. If this view wins, then it really is Goodbye Berlin!
English translation by Melissa Maldonado
Goodbye Berlin by Constanza Macras premiered in October 2025 at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.
