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 Elvan Tekin’s “To be a fish in a Raki bottle”
The imaginary desire to swim in a bottle of alcohol – as expressed in the last verse of the poem Eskiler Aliyorum (tr. I buy rags) by Orhan Veli Kanik, who revolutionized Turkish poetry during the 1940s – was a remedy for his aspiration to escape. It also summarized the longings of millions living in the Republic of Turkey’s complex sociocultural, economic and political structure. Nurtured and inspired by the Kurdish feminist movement, the performance is an invitation to experience a feast of visual and musical expression of the self, the individual body, one’s fluid identity, and the complexity of exile, multi-layered identities and their transnational character.
ELVAN TEKIN is a translator, dancer and choreographer based in Berlin. Driven from her upbringing as a Kurdish woman in the geo-politics of west Asia, her artistic interests lie in the entangled and fluid notions of one’s body, language, identities and their mutations & transformations. Her artistic practice continually seeks new terrains of knowing and being in the society that is beyond the simple ‘multiculturalism’ or ‘diversity’. As a dancer, she worked among others with Eyal Dadon, José Vidal and Edan Gorlicki in venues such as Kampnagel, Thalia Theater, Uferstudios and Hellerau in Germany. Currently, Elvan is studying for an MA in choreography at HZT, Berlin.
CHOREOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE Elvan Tekin
MUSIC, SOUND DESIGN Alireza Ostovar
LIGHT DESIGN, PRODUCTION Valeria Oviedo
DRAMATURGY Magdalena Lermer & Maya Weinberg
Tickets: 10–15€
