After two years of a compromised festival due to pandemic restrictions, this Tanz im August 2022 festival edition finally brings all the international dance artists back to Berlin to celebrate the art of contemporary dance. We made a list of the pieces we really look forward to watching.
Jorinde Voigt, KÖNIG GALERIE, photo: Roman März
Because of the general lockdown caused by the coronavirus, the entire world has recently become increasingly dependent on the wonders of the Internet. But even Netflix can get boring after some time. Luckily, many Berlin artists and institutions make their collections and performances available online – so you can finally go to that museum or gallery you’ve always been intrigued by but never visited!
photo: Frank Sperling
Do you have a favorite apocalypse? Imagine you could choose between, team atomic war, team climate-catastrophe or team asteroid? Or would you then rather love a real biblical Armageddon-thingy with seven plagues and at least an obese woman pretending to be a dark messiah coming for us all?
The newest dance performance light spectacle by Ariel Efraim Ashbel and friends called no apocalypse not now at HAU 1 is bringing all the weirdest apocalypses to the stage you can imagine. From devastating no man’s land to a world who is formed by black bubbles floating around, the performance collective was able to create with a few simple ingredients a dark, humorous and enigmatic powerplay of images for the audience.
Company Wayne McGregor
The Tanz im August Festival is back showcasing the immensely diverse world of contemporary dance on the stages of Berlin! From the August 10 to September 2 you’ll be able to enjoy and experience a wide range of dances throughout the city. From international productions by established creators to newcomers and world premieres. On top of that, the program also includes talks and workshops so the public can engage by participating and learn through action. And now, without further ado, we present you our selection of the 10 most exciting pieces from this edition of Tanz im August. Enjoy!
Coming from the queer black and latin underground culture of New York over 50 years ago the Ball Culture took a long time to finally arrive in good old Berlin. Thanks to the famous Paris Is Burning documentary and – yes, maybe also because of that one Madonna song – the Ballroom Community and more specifically one of its disciplines – Voguing – have surfaced from the subculture into the mainstream, also spreading the concept into many major cities in the world. Learn more about the history of voguing in this earlier iHeart feature.
In Berlin, one of the major independent theaters has embraced the local Ball Culture inviting it onto its stage. Together with the Berlin Ballroom Community, the Hebbel Am Ufer manages to successfully melt the intimate world of Ballrooms with the extroverted world of performance art. It’s a fantastic spectacle that let’s a wider audience get a peek into an otherwise quite private world, encouraging people who are curious about Voguing to join a House or even form a new one. Berlin already has a couple of “Houses” which is how a group of Voguers is called that form a fabulous little family.
This past Saturday we had the chance to join the Opulence Ball at HAU2 and of course, we wouldn’t miss the opportunity to take a couple of photos and animated GIFs. Enjoy the show!
photos: Carrie Schneider
Nudity is nothing a Berliner is particularly shocked about. In contrary, I think that Berlin is the city with the most public nakedness in the world if you consider all the nude beaches and public sex parties. It is also a different nakedness than in a tropical or Mediterranean city because the weather is not actually inviting to take off your close. The Berlin nudity is a public statement to the liberation of the human body from all the social, political and gender oppressions. At least that is what I like to read into it, even though I doubt that all of the half naked 19year old kids at the Pornceptual parties would agree.
But I am losing track here. Let’s discuss Berlin’s political intentions on nudity another time… I actually just wanted to recommend a damn sexy contemporary dance festival starting today: Tanz im August. Scrolling through the pics I saw some naked flesh popping up in the press folder and I was wondering if a conservative audience would claim that the dance world needs sex to get more attention from the younger audience. This could not be more wrong. Dance is not automatically sexy when the bodies on stage are naked.
But there is an element of contemporary dance that I find extremely sexy (which is why I also used this alluring headline). It is the intensity and the ability to control, perform and present yourself and your body that intrigues the spectator. A contemporary performer is always in a constant dialogue between his own body and the audience and is within this dialogue able to create tension and persuasion. From my point of view, most of the times the nakedness of a performer is actually not erotic but rather a narration of intimacy and disclosure.
We selected several dance pieces from the festival taking places in some of our favorite theaters including Sophiensaele, Hau and Volksbühne, that we think are promising and worth visiting. Our recommendations after the jump.
photo: Marc Coudrais
Do you remember the good old days when the whole family went to the ballet to see the Nutcracker or Swan Lake for the holidays? At least in Germany it is a tradition on Christmas to go to the theater or to the ballet. Usually the Christmas program is very charming and family-friendly. If you have your parents coming to visit and want to experience this kind of theater I recommend you check out the program of Staatsballett and Komische Oper (but if you really want to go remember to book your tickets in advance)
The good thing in Berlin is that there is always the extreme opposite to all the typical German traditions. We found an unusual and intriguing selection of hot contemporary dance pieces and events coming up in the next few weeks, that we would like to present you here. The pieces after the jump might not be family friendly, but will definitely crack some nuts (in one way or another). Our list with photos and trailers after the jump.
photo: Ian Douglas
I have heard about the work of Berlin-New York nomadic dancer Jeremy Wade quite a lot in the last years and never made it to any of his shows. The new dance theater piece he is performing at HAU Theater is an aggressive/sexy/disturbing (choose you adjective) monologue about the different aspects of death. In a dark, American-Horror-Story-like queer setting Wade experiments with vehicles for experiencing different deaths – death of theater, value, sense, and attachment. Jeremy Wade uses death as a metaphor to give the audience a wake-up call projecting his research on the death of our Western society into the future. The dates, pictures and a video after the jump.
photo: Garrett Davis/capture imaging
When you go to the theater most of the time your role will be that of the audience. You sit there and watch a bunch of excentric crazy people running around naked and screaming on stage. Well, that’s my very simplistic description of going to theater in Berlin 😉 But what if you have a different role at your next theater visit? What if you become part of the performance? That’s an experience that will certainly change your view on theater.
The piece Western Society by the famous and beloved Berlin-based theater company Gob Squad is basically an ongoing re-enactment of one of the most boring and ordinary youtube videos of a family gathering in front of the TV set and watching something while going on about their business in the background. Of course the piece dives way deeper into the behavior, norms, traditions and conflicts of our modern society, but I would like to leave that up to you to discover it.
When I was watching this piece a few months ago I was pretty puzzled when right in the beginning of the play one of the actors threw a plush animal in my face and asked me to come down to the stage and participate in the performance. Oups, I was not exactly expecting that. I was than charmingly introduced into the clever system of headset-based prompting by none other than Tatiana Saphie, star of our online comedy The Fruit Salad, who was also one of the actors in Western Society. And than I found myself among the actors and other members of the audience right in the middle of the theater set re-enacting the living room scene while the main actors gave me instructions what to do and what to say through my ear piece. It was certainly an unexpected and exciting experience. After the jump there are some photos of the piece and a short extract from the recording of the show with me in it. It looks rather weird, but it was really fun and I had the honor of having the only speaking role of the guests so that was extra cool.
UPDATE: Western Society by Gob Squad is playing again this weekend on March 17-19, 2018 at HAU in Kreuzberg. Don’t miss it and reach for those flying plush animals!
photos: Florian Braun
Retrospectives are usually more of a common thing for older, established artists and do not fit the usual style of the fast changing league of Berlin’s avant-garde. But it seems that looking back has become the new fast forward in this town. In the case of the dancing duo Jared Gradinger and Angela Schubot we really don’t mind to see a retrospective of all their work they have done so far at the HAU Theater. Gradinger has also created the little fluffy Pictoplasma monsters we love so much and gathered some international reputation working with Costanza Macras in the past. I prefer there earlier pieces like Is Maybe to the latest, but make up your mind for yourself. Check out the Facebook event for all the details. More hot dancing pictures after the jump.
Read on…