Tanztage Berlin 2025 blends critical reflection with artistic experimentation. With four premieres and six revivals – plus a discourse and workshop program on scarcity, body politics, and burnout – its 34. edition is obsessed with freedom, as much as the pioneer mothers of modern dance were over a century ago. The program explores the burdens that bodies carry in a world that sees them mostly as problems to be solved. Between tracelessness and hypervisibility, depths and surfaces, limitation and liberation, here bodies inhabit ambiguous spaces in-between. They refuse fixed definitions or settling into rigid narratives. As vehicles for joy and rage, survival and refusal, they invite us to shake loose, redistribute weight, and insist on taking up space.
For almost three decades, our festival for Berlin-based emerging dance makers has often mirrored aesthetic and political divisions in the scene or its economic precarity. As a kick-off to the yearly cultural calendar, many times we were forced to be the avant-garde of problem-solving, working through tensions and crises hitting the cultural landscape. This time is no different.
Since the expected funding for Tanztage Berlin 2025 fell victim to the budget freeze, our budget had to be cut in half. For the artists and our team this implied several months of stress, insecurity and finally – disappointment. For a unique Europe-wide recognized producing platform like Tanztage, this means a step backwards: fewer premieres, no new group works, smaller formats and teams, and above all, much less money for Berlin’s emerging artists, who already work in precarious conditions.
Unlike politicians who choose fiscal conservatism and neoliberal austerity measures over critical art and social well-being, at Sophiensæle, we feel responsible both for Tanztage Berlin and those most vulnerable in the independent performing arts scene. Over the last years with Tanztage, we have been already practising less is more. With this edition we decided to do more with much less. After many stressful weeks and initial plans to shorten the festival, we have found a way to present the usual 10 works selected out of over 200 submissions over 17 days. We counter the austerity by insisting on an abundance of choreographic perspectives, shared knowledge, care and community. We celebrate the dance scene in its fierceness. We celebrate our audiences. We celebrate Tanztage as a place where we gather, question, and plot the future together. We want to hold space for the mess of what is, what has been, and what could be.
photo: Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė
