Training for Political Imaginaries brought together artists, organisers and cultural workers to confront the overlapping crises facing Berlin’s dance community: severe funding cuts, state censorship, and the suffocating climate around solidarity with Palestine. This report situates the meeting within Germany’s broader political context—where austerity and militarism converge—and reflects on how artists and arts workers are reclaiming collective imagination, resistance and dialogue as infrastructures for survival and transformation.
Dokumented by Alice Heyward
Gathering in the Wreckage
Amid fatigue, grief, fear, and courage, a small group of artists, cultural workers, and curators gathered on 20–21 September 2025 at DIORAMA—the central working space of Jefta van Dinther and collaborators. Co-hosted by FreelanceDanceEnsembleBerlin (FDEB) together with Zeitgenössischer Tanz Berlin (ZTB) e.V., the weekend formed part of TanzAllianzen, a nationwide network project initiated by Tanzbüro Berlin with ten dance offices and networks across ten federal states. With this weekend, Tanzbüro Berlin formally handed over the Berlin satellite format of TanzAllianzen to key players in the Berlin dance scene. Within this context, the two-day meeting addressed ongoing struggles in the field and their historical and future entanglements.
As Bettina Knaup chillingly warned in a workshop breakout group, the question in Germany today is not if the AfD will come to power, but when—and how we prepare for an even darker political climate. The gathering aimed to reforge resistance: to rupture the individualising logic of freelance careers and bridge struggles between state violence abroad and austerity at home amid the rise of fascism.
It was a discursive and practice-based intervention in the troubled terrain of independent contemporary dance in Berlin. Already a precarious field composed largely of migrant artists, dance in Berlin, and those who work in the field, now face existential threats from substantial government cuts to cultural funding, education, healthcare, and urban planning, amid drastically rising living costs in the city.
Austerity and Complicity
The significant arts cuts were part of a broader austerity package adopted on 19 December 2024, when the Berlin Senate passed the 2025 budget, slashing approximately €130 million from arts and culture.
Germany’s debt crisis and austerity program cannot be blamed solely on COVID expenditure and budget savings. Another force driving these cuts is the exponential increase in military and “defence” spending. Germany, infamously guilty of the Nazi regime’s horrific genocidal crimes of the Holocaust, remains ensnared by its Staatsräson—formalised by Angela Merkel in 2008 as Germany’s historical responsibility for Israel’s security. This position, bolstered by the state’s adoption of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism, effectively conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, institutionalising repression and silencing dissent.
Germany is now the world’s second-largest external supplier of arms to Israel. As we have witnessed—livestreamed daily since Hamas’s deadly attacks and hostage-taking on 7 October 2023—Netanyahu’s government has bombarded Gaza ceaselessly, killing over 70,000 people and displacing its entire population. Germany’s support for Israel persists, even as global condemnation intensifies.
Lawmakers amended the Basic Law to lift the “debt brake” for defence spending, enabling massive rearmament. While the move responds in part to real threats posed by Putin’s war on Ukraine, the German state—bound by its own murderous past—has become complicit in the genocide in Gaza, funnelling millions toward destruction while cutting support for art, care, and education at home.
The connection is clear: Germany is fostering militarism while punishing cultural critique. In Berlin, this has manifested, and continues to, as a suffocating social climate of cultural repression and fear around expressing solidarity with Palestine. The attack on cultural funding cannot be separated from the silencing of dissent.
Disillusionment and Contradiction
By December 2024—over a year into the relentless bombardment of Gaza and Germany’s violent suppression of pro-Palestine protests—I was in despair about how to fight against the cultural cuts. It felt incongruous to march passionately for arts funding when I sensed many loud voices for this cause weren’t also marching for Palestine. Marching against the arts cuts was encouraged, yet marching for Palestinian liberation came with police arresting and harassing the protestors, and the threat of censorship, defunding, deplatforming and even deportation. It is profoundly unjust that those protesting the genocide in Gaza must cover their faces to avoid recognition and the severe repercussions that may follow. Kitty O’Brien is one of many who have recently endured such consequences, sustaining broken bones after being assaulted by Berlin police. How oppressive to be culturally sanctioned to protest against one violence, but not another, when both, one abroad, one at home, stem from the same state apparatus.
Countless artists, activists, and public figures who have spoken out for Palestine have been censored, stigmatised, or deplatformed, losing even more work amid austerity. Projects such as Archive of Silence have emerged to document this repression. Even a wordless painting by Hamishi Farah, depicting former culture minister Joe Chialo, was censored at Transmediale 2025. The painting, simply a portrait of the senator, slyly announced by curator Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung to be the basketballer Michael Jordan, laid bare how racial misrecognition, irony, and censorship intersect in Germany’s cultural politics, exposing the uneasy ties between its professed solidarity with Israel and its ongoing dismantling of public arts funding. Chialo’s ministry pushed for the IHRA definition as a grant requirement following October 7—only to be thankfully overturned after mass protests and the launch of the Strike Germany action, which called for a boycott of state institutions. Still, Farah’s painting was deemed “inappropriate” and removed, revealing that nonviolent, even latent, critique itself is punished.
Berlin’s mythology of freedom has curdled into provincial repression. Artist Ella CB, in her podcast We Lost the Plot (The Tale and the Tongue, ep. 25), critiques how “culture and remembrance” have been weaponised for fascist politics. And as John Holton wrote in Spike Art Magazine: “What was once an environment that facilitated art and imaginative dreaming has become something of a Potemkin village.”
Despite all this, disillusionment is not my, nor the participants’ in Training for Political Imaginaries‘, default position. Though radically different in scale, quality and consequence, the genocide in Gaza and the destruction of independent dance in Berlin emerge from the same reactionary turn. Both demand solidarity. To fight one without the other is to miss their shared root: the state’s attack on imagination and dissent.
Day 1 — Organising Against Isolation
The first day of the weekend meeting began with the diagnosis that has haunted us for years: fragmentation, exhaustion, atomisation. Without new collective imaginaries, we risk remaining captives of neoliberal time—forever hustling and precarious.
Representatives from GDBA and Dancers Connect (Hannah Walther and Anika Bendel) joined via Zoom for a conversation outlining legal frameworks and advocacy models. We discussed the limits of existing unions, associations and otherwise for freelance artists—ver.di Berlin-Brandenburg; Fachbereich Medien, Kunst und Industrie; Arbeitsgruppe Art Worker Solidarity and bbk berlin e.V.
After Hannah Walther and Anika Bendel left, Sonja Hornung, who is is a part of a the Arbeitsgruppe Art Worker Solidarity (a working group of bbk berlin/Professional Association of Visual Artists Berlin), shared rich insight into how the visual arts sector in Berlin campaigns and organises. We imagined new hybrid forms: associations that defend both artistic autonomy and workers’ rights. How to demand fair conditions (sick pay, social security, pensions) within a system accustomed to denying them? How to resist being atomised subjects, competing for scraps of funding and visibility?
We discussed data collection to expose precarity, while acknowledging how metrics can erase lived experience. Siegmar Zacharias cooked a Romanian soup for the break, and each person received €20 for their participation —a small redistribution that both acknowledged and resisted the realities of scarcity.
The afternoon deepened into a conversation about intersecting alliances and institutions that are at work for the field of dance in Berlin and the urgent issues at stake. Freelance Dance Ensemble Berlin was initiated by Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Jared Gradinger, Silke Bake, Sheena McGrandles, Martin Hansen, Jule Flierl, Laurie Young & Siegmar Zacharias. Zacharias and Young have also joined the board of ZTB alongside Julia Laperrière, Ana Laura Lozza, Claudia Garbe and Arantxa Martínez in 2024 in response to the funding cuts. The group addressed the necessity for a fair practice agreement, transparency, gender equity, the struggles many Berlin-based freelancers face with migration, and affirmed compliance with the minimum wage as a baseline for resistance. Laurie referenced the Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists (CADA) as a long-term model of sustainable activism: structured resistance.
Day 2 — Three Horizons
Sunday’s workshop, Exploring Futures – Shaping Change, employed the Three Horizons framework (‘3H’, developed by Bill Sharpe), led by the facilitator Katja Sonnemann, to map systemic transformation across temporal scales:
This exercise’s radical potential lies in collapsing what is “realistic.” Our discussion envisioned a dance ecology grounded in resilience and autonomy, free from political and economic control. We imagined structural funding for independent artists, more diverse leadership, and abolition of white supremacist and ableist decision-making. We called for a renewed social valuation of art, for residencies, fair copyright laws, international solidarity and rich criticism cultures.
The conversation moved between the poetic and the practical: Can compassion, rest, and care become economic indicators? How might dance ally with the healthcare and education sectors? How can somatic practices extend beyond studios to social life?
We asked how to fund dance without state complicity. How absurd is the expectation to crowdfund via personal social media platforms for danceWEB scholarships at ImPulstanz, while many in the community are crowdfunding for food and eSIMs in Gaza? While protesting both the state’s cuts to the arts and its support for Israeli arms in the war in Gaza is vital, there’s something disproportionate, illuminated by the algorithm’s homogenising effect on content, about soliciting peer donations for one’s professional endeavours on the same online platforms used to call for lifelines for displaced and starving civilians. The expectation to market one’s artistic work under such conditions is unfair and disillusioning.
How then can dancers fund these endeavours? What forms of protest and activism do we imagine and invent? How to protest and rally for what cause? The group emphasised training for solidarity. We spoke of intergenerational exchange, historical awareness and the need to connect with workers in other precarious sectors—care, cleaning, logistics—to build transversal alliances.
Practical ideas emerged for the next 3–9 months: forming small working groups, developing new governance models and drafting unified messages. Proposals included monthly workshops, open letters, and mutual aid networks. The urgency was to keep visionary thinking and pragmatic action together: to unionise without losing imagination.
Tensions and Contradictions
Inclusion vs Marginalisation:Political radicality demands reflexivity. Who speaks? Who risks more? Who is excluded by language, debt, or ability? The more combative the rhetoric, the greater the vigilance required to unlearn hierarchies within our own scene.
Sustainability vs Momentum: The movement must refuse burnout as praxis. The political imaginary includes rest, recovery, and interdependence as vital forms of resistance.
Demands and Proposals
A loose manifesto emerged:
- Hybrid Union Models: Dance-specific associations federating with labour movements rather than merely fitting into them.
- Shared Benefit Funds: Health, emergency, and pension pools accessible to independent artists.
- Networked Governance: Rotating regional assemblies within TanzAllianzen to deliberate resources and conflicts.
- Time Commons: Protected time for rest, reflection, and collective study.
- Radical Granting Logic: Funding bodies must cede control—trust collectives and fund the unquantifiable.
- Transversal Alliances: Build solidarities between dance, care, education, and climate movements.
- Mutual Aid & Redistribution: Distribute surplus, however small, as Siegmar’s soup reminded us: generosity is infrastructure.
Training for Political Imaginaries was a generative confrontation of futures. It staged a refusal: that dance must be tamed by the market, that the artist must be solitary, that creative life is an individual contract with precarity.
From Berlin’s labouring bodies rose a collective dare:
To build dance worlds that resist commodification.
To fold care into structure.
To reject isolation.
To insist that imagination itself is a political infrastructure.
This gathering was an event to spark hope and action—alive, unresolved, contagious. May its embers spread, not only as a network but as a living terrain for solidarity and counterpower.
A collaboration between FreelanceDanceEnsembleBerlin, ZTB e.V. and Tanzbüro Berlin in the frame of TanzAllianzen. TanzAllianzen is funded by the Performing Arts Fund from funds provided by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. The Berlin Satellite is cofinance by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. With the kind support of Diorama.
