Hey, why do you look so tired? “Urgency culture” expects us to be connected and responsive constantly. There is little to no time left to imagine the world otherwise. Tanztage Berlin – a yearly festival highlighting the work of the city’s emerging dance makers – is back to diagnose the present and predict the future. Its 32nd edition investigates our daily overstimulation and chronic fatigue by reflecting on how we move to the rhythm of today’s high-speed, social media-driven reality and its challenges.
Instead of being stuck inside the old stories of progress and growth that depend on extracting profit from the earth and the body, the work presented in the festival aims to flip the script. It dances to slow down, restore, reclaim, transform or envision a new self, outside the paradigm of self-optimization. From collective dream meditations through protest dances to solo musicals dealing with content overload, it invites us to observe the exchange between bodies, replenish depleted resources and rejuvenate through dancing.
The program presents ten performances, one of them is Bully Fae Collins’ “Songs of the Dopamine Carousel”
While using dance and songs to tell stories about personal fears, dreams and desires, this fragmented musical performance shifts from self-talk to embodying characters from the online world – news anchors, preachers and influencers – giving an incomplete picture of their apocalyptic fantasies and political agendas. Constantly overwhelmed by information without resolution, the individual performer is feeling and thinking through his troubles while stuck in the endless loop of chemical rushes and crashes induced by a stream of online content: the solo collages cultural satire and personal storytelling, portraying the incoherence of our political moment.
BULLY FAE COLLINS (b. 1990 Prince Frederick, MD) creates music, dance and theater about the heightened anxiety of the Information Age and the politicization of bodies under neoliberalism. As a trickster who toils in the refuse of pop culture and history, he weaves the personal, the fictional, and the historical into troublesome queer satires. He received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore MD and has since toured the US and Europe with various projects. Bully is currently based in Berlin.
MAX EILBACHER (b. 1991 Baltimore, MD) completed his undergraduate studies in Baltimore, majoring in cinematic arts with a minor in computer music and animation, all while maintaining an active touring schedule with a diverse range of projects, including the musical group Horse Lords, whose just intonation-based trance music exemplifies a modern response to the minimalist tradition. He has presented solo compositions, abstracted electronic mediums, and performed with a number of different groups throughout North America, Canada, Europe, and Japan. He has very recently relocated to Berlin.
WRITER, DIRECTOR, PERFORMER Bully Fae Collins
COMPOSER Max Eilbacher
DRAMATURGICAL SUPPORT Dandan Liu
Tickets:10–15€