‘What is the theme of this year?’ I ask fellow Springbacker Evgeny Borisenko after a performance at Tanz im August, Berlin’s annual international dance festival that is now in its 37th edition. Despite it being the last week of the programme, this is the first show I’m seeing, and the only one Evgeny and I manage to cross paths at. ‘Tectonic landscapes!’ replies Evgeny, triggering a shared eye roll. It sounds remarkably similar to 2024’s ‘archipelago’ premise, framing the festival as a collection of islands (or dance works) with contrasting landscapes, cultures, and stories.
Tectonic landscapes is not a bad theme, and could be seen as timely. In 2025, the ground feels as if it’s constantly shifting beneath our feet – with unpredictable changes and crises both in the dance world and in society at large. Yet the way Tanz im August introduces itself in a press release as unfolding ‘like a tectonic landscape,’ with ‘the friction caused by encounters between artists, shows and audience members’ risks sounding like a curatorial get-out-of-jail-free card: a focus on variety and diversity justifying the absence of a distinct throughline.
Should dance festivals feel obligated to state a unifying theme? Or could presenting a programme of outstanding works stand on its own, without further rationale? At Tanz im August, the five works I saw suggested that thematic links can emerge organically rather than being prescribed by curators. In my view, Brazilian choreographer Lia Rodrigues’ Borda, Berlin-based Lygia Lewis’ Some Thing Folk, and Spanish choreographer Inka Romani’s Fandango Reloaded all drew on traditional, folk, and ritual movement practices, exploring how these can be reimagined on stage in inventive ways. Meanwhile, on a more compositional level, Fandango Reloaded and Basel-based Jeremy Nedd’s from rock to rock… aka how magnolia was taken for granite both employed repetitive stepping patterns that gradually increased in complexity, accumulated movements, and evolved over time. When no red thread presents itself, perhaps there is value in simply allowing audiences the freedom to discover their own connections.
— EM
Performances
Némo Flouret, Derniers Feux
HAU1 14.08.2025
The 2025 edition of Tanz im August opened not with a whisper but with a bang. Némo Flouret’s Derniers Feux, presented on opening night, turned the stately stage of HAU 1 into a combustive spectacle – equal parts Felliniesque parade and postmodern playground. A huge free-standing scaffold literally erupts in dozens of tiny sparklers. Dancers dart across the space, clad in black and white, amid blasting trumpet tunes and barking dogs. It’s chaotic, noisy, and a little absurd – until a performer grabs a megaphone and starts giving orders to the ensemble, making the reference to the final parade of Fellini’s 8½ unmistakable.
Philippe Quesne’s striking set design is in turns a playing field and a construction site: a towering metal structure offers three tiers for the musicians-performers to climb, dance or pose; and lends a vertical dimension to the otherwise cramped stage of HAU1. Kinetic objects, cardboard letters and props are incessantly rearranged and carried; epic colourful costumes flutter overhead atop wooden sticks, darts rain on stage like flower bouquets. The choreography shuttles between repetitive grand and circular arm gestures, reminiscent of Lucinda Childs’ ‘Train’ scene in Bob Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, and fleet, almost whimsical sequences: arms become windmills, bodies cascade, balance and twist, giving the entire show a playfully reckless but urgent drive. A carnival in the making, Derniers Feux guides the eye with carefully composed groupings and assemblages, always organising the uproar into moments of surprise. Ropewalkers suddenly become trumpeteers, dancers play electric guitars and smash the tambours just before joining yet another singing procession: a tongue-in-cheek reference to a military defilé or a colourful fashion show. It’s raucous but intentional, exuberant but never loose.
Derniers Feux pulses with the nervous energy of something about to start – or fall apart. Underneath the carefully orchestrated bustle and moments of stillness lies a sharp meditation on anticipation itself: the anxious, ecstatic moment just before something happens. And the firework motif, both intimidating and celebratory, brings a dash of suspense and helps unfold multiple layers of public memory: collective nostalgia, shared anxiety, flashes of euphoria and reckless joy. In the final scene, a lone dancer performs a long and ungainly balancing act in silence, wobbling before regaining control and casually unplugging the lights. The blackout is sudden, and the silence after it, earned. With Derniers Feux, Flouret does not just open the festival – with glowing intensity he captures the restless state of waiting and the beauty of not knowing what comes next.
—EB
Xan Dye, I am rooted but I flow
HAU2 Studio, 16.08.2025
I am rooted but I flow by Xan Dye took inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s quote ‘I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.’ Woolf, in turn, was influenced by the waves of the sea at St Ives, and the continuous transitions of thoughts, feelings and sensations it evoked.
Dye bases their performance on this search for constant transformation. Unlike in many other relaxed performances, Dye not only wants to adapt the environment to the needs of audiences, but aims to use the concept of relaxation itself as a movement strategy. They sit in a small square bordered by LED lights. The audiences can stand, sit and lie in the grey and black chairs and bean bags scattered around. Dye rocks their body, starting with the shoulders and evolving into the legs. Later, they stand up, bend forward and let their upper body swing from left to right, like a metronome, on steady electronic beats, which become intense at some points. In synergy with gravity, the body has a moment of rest before swinging back again. Captured in a pulse, it creates its own wave and has a meditative quality you can lean into.
The first loop of 25 minutes breaks off quite unexpectedly. Dye goes to the side, has a chat with the technician and takes a sip of water without acknowledging the audience sitting and lying there. It leaves me puzzled. I also experience a lack of care in the soft space created for the audience: it is actually quite exposed, and not so comfy. The written instructions, including the permission to make sound, are not enough to break the theatrical code of watching in silence. We all tiptoe around in order not to disturb.
What does it mean to use relaxation as an artistic tool and embed the work in an environment that enhances the experience? An interesting and important topic in at this time in which there is more awareness of neurodivergence and the different ways people experience and digest information. But the exploration of I am rooted but I flow stays too much on the surface to provide a profound answer.
—AvZ
Clara Furey, Unarmoured
HAU2 14.08.2025
In Unarmoured, Canada-based choreographer Clara Furey aims to explore the ways in which ‘queer bodies reclaim sovereignty over their desires and pleasures’. What is left to see however is a somewhat cold representation of lifeless eroticism. Joined by three other dancers, Furey builds the 60-minute piece around ever-shifting constellations: oscillating between playful sensuality in solos and almost mechanical duos and trios. From the first minutes the dancers’ bodies entwine, pin, guide and slam each other just before they retreat to self-absorbed solos, in which arching backs and self-stroking take a lead. Rich in mechanical hip thrusts and lunges, duos seemingly portraying sexual acts more closely resemble a pilates routine. The dancers’ gazes are so barren and empty, I began to question their agency. For a piece about claiming desire and pleasure, Unarmoured is conspicuously devoid of both.
Twin Rising’s throbbing and volatile soundscape and Paul Chambers’s delicate light work – shifting from smoky violets and greens to sudden strobe-like flashes – certainly lends some mystical emotion and pace to the otherwise bleak show. But even an inevitable descent into a club rave act (heel taps, side steps, elbow kicks and hip slaps, nothing crazy!) gets quickly flattened by the return of joyless hip thrusts, wrestling locks and pins. Strikingly, the only moments when dancers briefly let loose some emotion and joy are a few solo scenes. Alone on stage, Justin de Luna does deliver a brief moment of rapture: his joy is palpable, body pulsates freely to thunderous techno beats and he momentarily transcends the show’s affectless aesthetic. But whenever the performers are back together their eyes switch back to their scripted despair: gaze vacant, skills evident but intent uncertain. Despite last minute gestures towards tenderness, Unarmoured feels like a piece that tries too hard to be cool and sexy but ends up as neither. But above all it made me wonder why queer desire and pleasure are so often staged in such dreary tones. Where is the pleasure that we claim to reclaim?
—EB
Adam Linder, Ethan Braun and Solistenensemble Kaleidoscop, TOURNAMENT
Radialsystem, 15.08.2025
A collaboration between choreographer Adam Linder and composer Ethan Braun is a full-scale test even for a seasoned spectator: a collaboration-competition between five dancers and five musicians from Solistenensemble Kaleidoscop is meticulously crafted, but at times overly complex and relentlessly intense. From the starting whistle, the piece pulses with immediacy and sets the pace: dancers and musicians probe, challenge and answer one another, trading athletic ground movements for sudden vertical lifts, answering rhythmic tunes with sweeping almost combative gestures. The spare and luminous set – a stepped white pyramid – oversees the TOURNAMENT: the musicians first gather at its steps, and the dancers swarm its base. The boundaries between choreography and musical score blur until a rush of electronic sound shifts the balance and the ‘match’ morphs into boldly individual and witty solos. Classical technique flashes across the dancers’ bodies but is quickly repurposed through clever provocation and style interplay. At times musicians retreat behind the instruments or even become human obstacles; at others dancers wield violin bows like swords or shoulder cellos as if pallbearers in a strange funeral ritual.
Virtuosic and incredibly fast-paced, TOURNAMENT unfolds in heats and phases, drawing inspiration from competitive sport yet treating every encounter as both a confrontation and a dialogue. This structure and pace are hard to keep up with though: whenever I set my gaze on a scene or a movement pattern or try to follow a chord progression they promptly morph and evolve into an even more complex intercourse. Despite Linder and Braun’s best attempts to peel the show’s slightly obscure structure in programme notes (their text turned out to be more confusing than helpful), their piece resembles a movement research lab set on stage, brilliant but seemingly indifferent to the audience’s capacity to keep pace.
Linder resists easy resolutions and tidy narratives: each new phrase introduces unexpected turns. Dramaturgical density and gravity are offset by an uncanny character. An outcast, an arbiter or a peeper, Juan Pablo Camara is always present: he rearranges the flowers, poses them at the pyramid’s steps, works the fan, veils and unveils the resting musicians. His delicate interventions offer perspective and critical distance to the otherwise overburdened performance and stitch the work together.
TOURNAMENT comes off as a fluid theatrical experiment, where rich movement and music scores continuously merge and complement each other. But to fully engage with its dense interplay of forms, one needs an expert’s eye and ear along with unwavering focus. Without that, the piece never transcends its mechanics and remains an intricate enigma – like a sphinx that doesn’t really care if its riddle will ever be solved.
—EB
Oona Doherty, Specky Clark
Radialsystem 21.08.2025
A woman falls from her chair at the kitchen table. Dead. Her son, enticingly performed by Zoé Lecorgne, repeatedly lipsyncs MUMMMM! in great despair. The word is shouted through space on voiceover, appearing on subtitles too. This three-dimensional approach adds to the immensity of this life-changing moment. Bombastic music, three demons, one with the word ‘devil’ on his bright red suit, sneak up on him from behind. They put on his coat, give him a suitcase and off he goes. To his two aunts.
It’s the dramatic start of Oona Doherty’s show about her great-great-grandfather, a Belfast boy who lost his mother at the age of ten and went to live with his aunts. Clay Kooner and Gennaro Lauro portray the aunts as a comic duo, with exaggerated and fragmented movements, a flow of (again lip-synced) words that leave no space for interruptions, and shout-outs such as ‘Gods love him’ in a thick Irish accent. Lurking with their cigarettes and observing the orphan with scepticism, they change his name to Specky Clark and prepare him for work in the slaughterhouse.
His first day in the abattoir is also Samhain (Celtic Halloween), and this is where the story zooms in. Specky Clark is forced to shoot a pig, but before he pulls the trigger, the pig (dancer Gerard Headley), in a dreamlike interbellum, gives him a much-needed hug. Their interconnectedness lifts the veil between the living and the dead on just this night and, amid a rousing feast of drinking, shouting and dancing, Specky and the pig embark on a quest for the portal to their dead loved ones. The music pumps, lights flicker and even the subtitles glitch in this border with the underworld – but will they fulfil their aim?
Specky Clark is the most theatrical of Oona Doherty’s performances to date, and she goes for it full swing. Mystique, folklore, cross-dressing, dance, music, light, voiceovers, slow motion, demons and all the characters are over the top. But in this world of absurdity we never lose track of the touching way Specky Clark is navigating his grief, escaping to his imagination in search for comfort.
—AvZ
Radouan Mriziga, Magec/The Desert
21/08/2025, HAU2
We’re in the dark, till we see a short flicker of light. And again, and again. After three attempts it’s dark again. But it doesn’t take long for the sun to appear on the screen hanging high up in the air, shining its golden light. The day has begun in the desert.
After Atlas/The Mountain, Magec/the Desert is the second part of Radouan Mriziga’s trilogy devoted to the elements. Inspired by the mythological stories of north African Amazigh culture, Mriziga aims to lay bare the hidden depths of the desert, and to extract its ancestral wisdom. The result is a magical and sensorial performance that goes behind rational comprehension. The sun makes space for three performances on screen. A woman, a child and a half man/half animal with white horns and white cloth over his face. They reach out to each other, with waving arms, but never look down. They are up in the air and seem to exist in the sky as both the past and the future.
On the ground, the flicker of light turned out to have successfully lit an incense burner. One performer becomes its bearer and, accompanied by six others (one in a striking goat-like mask and horns) ritually clears and occupies the space.
The light is soft and unclear and the atmosphere mellow – a mood which submerges a political message on French nuclear tests performed in the desert. When the light gets sharper, the goat-masked performer, musician Deena Abdelwahed, takes place behind the DJ booth, and as a high priest starts taking control over the sound. In different constellations, the dancers take the stage before disappearing to the side again. It takes a while before the energy sets in, but when it does it comes with joy. The six male performers are shoulder to shoulder, holding each other’s arms while slightly pumping their heads and rotating their wrists. The recurrent combination of movements is contagious.
In an interview with Avignon Festival, Mriziga describes how the desert is constantly moving. The dunes, the lights, the geographies. That ever-changing atmosphere is captured in the performance; intangible, but impactful nevertheless.
—AvZ
Yara Boustany, The Valley of Sleep
HAU3, 28.08.2025
A buzzing electric current races across a plastic curtain that intersects the stage. A poem about ‘umbilical wires’ and ‘tickling lava veins’ is read via voiceover. Red and blue lights flicker behind the curtain like fireflies. Gradually, it becomes clear that performers are manipulating them: the coloured lights fade, and their blurry silhouettes appear to glow as they lie on the ground, swaying their knees, twitching their feet, and circling their pelvises. For a long time, their faces remain hidden, and they resemble otherworldly creatures as they morph into peculiar configurations, from shoulder stands to deep, contorted lunges.
This is Yara Boustany’s The Valley of Sleep, a work framed by ambitious goals in its programme note. Referencing the quiet resilience of Beirut (Boustany herself was born in Ghbaleh, a village and municipality 42 kilometres north of the Lebanese capital), the text describes how the 2022 creation aims to show ‘how dreams, rituals, and images help make this power visible.’ And, while there is certainly a dream-like feel to the performance – the obscuring effect of the curtain and the ASMR-like crackles in the sound score create a soporific atmosphere – its poetic and abstract imagery mean that the extent to which it conveys the character of the city is questionable.
The three dancers begin to rise from the ground, taking up more space, intersecting each other’s pathways with hunched-shoulder shuffles before collapsing into a unison phrase of rapid gestures. A fourth female performer emerges from the audience, drawing the curtain back to reveal a clearer view of her three male, semi-naked castmates. Yet this literal reveal is not matched by conceptual revelation. Projections of computer code and a city skyline appear, while three performers cover themselves with sheets of white, shredded plastic before encircling and absorbing the lone female. Perhaps all of this carries significance for someone familiar with Beirut, but for me, the metaphorical curtain remains closed.
—EM
Cullberg/Lygia Lewis, Some Thing Folk
HAU1, 29.08.2025
I’ve never given much thought to what a Neolithic rave might look like, but if I had, I imagine it would resemble Berlin-based Lygia Lewis’s Some Thing Folk. At its climax, a large cast from Cullberg Ballet gathers around a campfire-like setup, slapping their limbs in overlapping polyrhythms. Occasionally, dancers break free from the circle to perform shunty, shimmying solos, arms raised to the heavens, only to fall back into hunched, tribalistic marches around the fire.
It takes a while to get to this point: for the opening half the dancers seem absorbed in their own worlds, stumbling across the stage and contorting their faces into childlike expressions of surprise. Some stutter as they try to utter nonsensical words and phrases, their intonations unpredictable: ‘Skin, skin, bone, bone, they’re comiiiiing!’ Meanwhile, another repeatedly falls backwards off a log, shouting a long ‘wooooaaaah’ as he descends, an action that is initially comical yet increasingly irritating.
There seems to be something at play about the ineffectiveness of language – or the sheer difficulty of communication. That the dancers eventually unite through percussive body sounds and movement, rather than their attempts at verbal articulation, is heartening at a time when dance performances are increasingly infiltrated by spoken word. (This year, a playwright rather than a choreographer won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale, and Springback writer Maria Chiara de Nobili noted how text can sometimes overpower the subtle art of communicating through movement in her reflection on Spring Forward 2025.)
Communication through movement is far from infallible, and that’s evident in Some Thing Folk. The dancers don’t seem fully comfortable in the odd state they’re embodying – a risk inherent with established companies working with choreographers for one-off commissions – and at times their peculiar antics come off as inauthentic. Should we laugh or take them seriously? As Lewis describes wanting to interrogate ideas of nationhood and national identity in the show text, it’s presumably the latter. Yet, as fleeting references to other dance styles emerge at the height of the celebratory rituals – awkward, knock-limbed attempts at balletic poses here, bouncy partner footwork resembling jazz or rock ’n’ roll there – I can’t help but wince at the absurdity of it all.
—EM
Inka Romani, Fandango Reloaded
HAU2, 30.08.2025
What are the parallels between Valencian folk dance and breaking, house and contemporary styles? That’s the question that lies at the heart of Inka Romani’s Fandango Reloaded. Yet, over the course of the work’s 50-minute duration, an answer remains elusive. Opening with a solo performer descending through the auditorium in a spotlight, singing autotuned Spanish lyrics, what follows is a succession of scenes in which six dancers – dressed in an eclectic mix of cargo pants, bomber jackets, and trainers as well as multicoloured pleated skirts and knee-high, tasseled socks – suddenly, and somewhat jarringly, switch between styles. One minute, they’re dosey-doeing, hopping, and raising arms in curved Vs, the next, they break out into dummy spins, backwards rolls, and twerks.
Some scenes make a more concerted effort to weave traditional and contemporary references together, namely those featuring repeated stepping patterns. Starting off slow, formal and contained, the straight-faced performers orbit each other with mathematical footwork, fading in and out of circular and straight lined formations associated with social dance. Gradually, they insert greater levels of torso motion and ‘groove’ into their repetitions, until their original sequence transforms into something entirely new. The energy becomes much more joyful, too, with mischievous glances and smiles shooting across the stage.
This joy, rather than any conceptual or compositional consideration of style crossovers, is the most engaging element of Fandango Reloaded. In a closing vignette, the cast gathers together in a tight circle, and each dancer takes their turn to showcase their skills in the centre, their fellow performers cheering and clapping around them. Everyone is celebrated, no matter what movement language they draw on. It seems to say that even when common ground can’t be found, the act of sharing and recognising differences is always positive.
—EM
Jeremy Nedd, from rock to rock… aka how magnolia was taken for granite
Sophiensaele, 30.08.2025
Inspired by rapper 2 Milly suing a video game company for using his signature ‘Milly Rock’ dance move – a side to side stepping motion with a downwards hand-slap on each side – Basel-based choreographer Jeremy Nedd’s 2023 work seeks to question whether anyone can truly own a dance step. It would be a tough question to answer through conversation, let alone through movement-based performance. And, as a five-strong cast – appearing like a boyband in their monochrome hoodies and jogging bottoms – repeats the Milly Rock in unison for a long opening section, shifting between different formations as they go, it’s unclear how Nedd’s going to pull it off.
That is until the energy shifts. The ‘Milly Rock’ motif gets bigger, ripples through the group in a sharp canon, and dancers break off to execute their own versions of it. Some add in basketball bouncing gestures, while others grow their lateral steps into sweeping motions across the stage, sliding in and out of the floor, letting their arms trail behind.
Nedd uses clever visual metaphors and allusions, as well as movement, to highlight the malleable nature of choreography. All the action of rock to rock takes place in a mountainous landscape: backdrops of misty, jagged stones hanging at the back of the stage, a large boulder made from crumpled grey paper at the front. This, along with the fact that the show opens with the cast locked Tetris-style in a rock formation before untangling, makes a clever link between movement evolution and how rocks are formed: they may appear solid and unchanging, but are in fact created through gradual layering, pressure, and transformation.
Nedd’s use of jazz piano in one section is also effective, the improvisatory music a perfect example of how source material can evolve into something entirely new. Rather than obsess over movement ownership, could dancers and choreographers adopt a similar ethos, treating choreographic material as ‘open source,’ available for others to reinterpret and transform? As he offers various examples of how visually striking and at times humorous the results can be – in a later scene, a dancer chants music lyrics preacher-like into a microphone, each linking to one word in the last in a playful nod to the word-association game that leaps across musical genres – it’s clear that Nedd seems to think so.
—EM
13–30.08.2025 Berlin, Germany