The 38th edition of Tanz im August opened at HAU1 on 13 August 2026 with Trapicana, a collaboration between Joana Tischkau, Jeremy Nedd, Sophie Yukiko and the Malpaso Dance Company. The Berlin festival is showing a total of 19 works at various venues through 29 August 2026.
What makes dance relevant? Berlin’s dance scene is not the only one forced to keep asking this question in the face of cuts to art funding with more on the horizon. In their opening speeches for Tanz im August, Annemie Vanackere, Artistic Airector of HAU, and Ricardo Carmona, the festival’s Director, provide similar answers. Encountering one another in a shared space as three-dimensional people who sense and can be sensed undermines, is how I would put it, the flat logic of projection and hatred that is increasingly being offloaded through anti-democratic efforts. That is what is still echoing in my ears as the curtain rises on the first scene of Trapicana.
A collaborative development between Joana Tischkau, who addresses hegemonic regimes of the gaze, Black culture, and the critique of authenticity, Jeremy Nedd, whose choreography integrates dance styles from different communities, Sophie Yukiko, co-founder of the German ballroom scene, and the Cuban Malpaso Dance Company, Trapicana combines sweeping, revue-style choreography with conceptual gestures, Afro-Cuban styles with vaudeville dance, clichés with their deconstruction. The pompom-shaped costumes (Lenna Stam) are wonderful, wobbling as they magnify the dancers’ movements into the comic-grotesque. Or the inflatable portal (set design: Lea Steinhilber) featuring the word Trapicana, a reference to the legendary nightclub in Havana. Over the course of the piece, a streak of vandalism first transforms Trapicana into Trap. A little later the letters are pieced back together into Patria (homeland). The stage, a site of beauty, virtuosity, and fame, a device for visibility – it is a trap, and still remains a home. Although the message is impossible to miss, I am left with questions. The piece obviously was not intended as pure entertainment. Caught in the relentless stare of the dancers, who vie for my gaze with mask-like smiles, who look out into the audience with indignation or even fear, I don’t exactly feel invited to open my senses and let what is happening enter my three-dimensional body. On the contrary, I sit nailed to my seat. And that is probably exactly how it is meant to feel. A reversal of the violent gaze, a reversal of the power relations.
But if everyone on stage feels as trapped as those in the audience, if there is nothing between the two separate spaces but watching and being watched – and I choose this word deliberately, because in English watching means both looking and keeping under surveillance – then isn’t it high time to turn the stage on its head, switch off the lights, and dance in the shadows, to release bodies (at least in the theater) from surveillance? Speaking of the relevance of dance and physical co-presence: Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s voices are haunting me. I open their book “All Incomplete” and read: “The unwatchable place we make when we watch with one another, having refused to watch one another, having refused one and another, is shared, unblocked, unloaded into a kink, the non non block of our stranded strand.”1