When Ricardo Carmona, the artistic director of Tanz im August, speaks about dance, he’s always dancing between the perspective of the artist and the audience.
Now in his second year leading Berlin’s largest festival of dance, the Portugal-born Carmona emphasises the event’s role as an ongoing collaboration between artists around the world, from the British-Rwandan dancemaker Dorothée Munyaneza to the Uruguayan choreographer Tamara Cubas. Another essential collaboration is with Berlin’s public, who by attending create the conditions for the performance.
“I think there’s always something very unique when someone makes the decision to see a live show nowadays, because there’s so many other possibilities,” Carmona says, pointing out how it is both a social and political decision for people to come together with strangers for a shared experience.
Carmona makes a point of emphasising the deep human sociality of dance – especially as captured in this year’s festival, whose 18 productions and 46 related events coalesce around the theme of migration, a longstanding human practice. The Berliner sat down with Carmona to move through the Tanz im August’s many layers, from venues and logistics to the idea that a dance performance could be called “soft”.
How was organising the festival different this year than the first one?
This is an interesting question. I think the festival has changed because the world really changed a lot since last year. And I feel that we have to reflect that in the programme. And the artists are also reflecting on these changes directly in the shows. So that’s something that I want to acknowledge. We also have very stable connections with the partners and the venues – so they are pretty much the same as last year. But there are some new spaces that have come into play, and this gives new shapes to the festival.
So for example, this year we present a project at Kraftwerk in collaboration with Berlin Atonal. It’s a project with Jefta van Dinther, and this is something especially exciting for us, because it’s a space where the festival has never been before. We also have a project called ‘Outbox Me Battle’, that happens at Tempelhofer Feld and is free for everyone.
These spaces were not used last year, so there are always things that shift. Of course, I want to keep a connection between what I did last year and what comes this year, but there are always things that shift from year to year.
The festival takes place across three weeks, and more than 10 locations in Berlin. How do you maintain continuity of character across such a large festival?
A dance show… activates in us different layers of our humanness.
I think a lot about that, because this year is going to be the 36th edition. So it’s a festival that has run for a long time, and I often go back and look into the programme that my predecessors were doing, because the festival took many shapes during all these years. I find it interesting to go back to the archives to see exactly, in these moments, on this year, what was happening – in the 1990s, or in 2000 for example. I find this very inspiring – but the festival has to keep changing, because everything’s changing around us.
There are a couple of things we started last year that will be present again this year. And I feel that they will come again in 2025. One of them is the connection between dance and ecology, and everything that has to do with climate change, climate justice – and how dance can also be a means to expand on these problems. I feel there was a kind of revival around this topic in the last years, and became fundamental for people to speak about after the pandemic.
And then there’s also what I usually call different lineages of contemporary dance – which refers to other practices of contemporary dance that are not following the traditional Western canon.
Why did you choose migration as the theme for this year’s festival?
I think it speaks for what we are living through. Migration is something that’s always existed. I mean, it’s not a new phenomenon. If we look way back through the history of humankind, we are always moving. Now, especially with the rise of the extreme right-wing forces in Europe – and also elsewhere in the world – I feel that this fact is questioned.
And, I mean, it has no logic, because cultures are built on these movements, right? They’re built on the movement of people that bring things from different cultures to other ones. And this kind of crossing is how things relate to each other. And of course, this movement of bodies relates to dance. Because dances are also moving all the time. And there are several shows in the festival this year that speak about this topic in very different ways.
When you’re putting together a festival, are you then balancing the shows conceptually and as experiences for audiences?
The affect of the shows is very important, because for me, a dance show or a performance in general, it’s not only a mental experience. It activates in us different layers of our humanness. It has a more mental, rational, conceptual aspect. But for me, it’s also important to have the sentiments, the feelings, the affects that a performance creates in us.
I also search for works that activate these layers in the public. I find it funny that, for example with films, people are more accepting of this aspect – there are a lot of films where people start to cry, and nobody questions that. But in performance it’s not present as much, or at least it’s not so spoken of so commonly, I would say. But this is something that, I believe, dance can also activate.
You can’t get away from the body…
Exactly, because of the connection we all have with our body, the feelings we share and the humanness of all of us. There’s immediately a connection that you as a spectator can feel with the dancers and with the performers. There are phenomenological studies that research what is called kinetic memory. So when you see someone making a movement, your brain recognises that movement and replicates it in your brain.
For example, when I do this [Carmona raises his phone] with my mobile phone, your brain knows what this movement is because you’ve done it so many times. Even if you are not a dancer, if you’re not a performer, this is something that’s activated in your body while watching a dance show.
You’ve described Alessandro Sciarroni’s piece, DREAM, which will have its German premiere at St. Elisabeth-Kirche on August 24, as “soft”. What do you mean by this?
I think it has to do with the connection that the performance managed to establish with the audience. When I saw the work live last year in Milan, there were just so many beautiful scenes that happened during that show. The performance is very calm, and you need to pay a lot of attention to what’s happening. Since it is a durational piece, people can come and go as they want.
At one point, three teenagers arrived. You have all these preconceptions, like, okay, they’re going to leave because this is not for them. But they stayed for half an hour or so, and then they went away. I was like, yeah, sure. But then they came back with a huge group of friends, and they stayed for a long time. It was beautiful to see how the piece touched them. Softness is another way that performance can connect with people.
When you see a show and you want to jump out of the chair to clap because you’re so charged with energy it’s great, and we have pieces like that in the festival. But there are also projects that activate another response. It’s hard to describe, but it activates in me another part of my emotions and another part of my brain. It’s not that you feel excited and pushed and gaining a lot of energy, but it’s more – I don’t want to use the word cosiness, but there’s something about this feeling of: you can relax. I think it has to do with a melancholic aspect that art also has – and that for me is not a bad thing.
I don’t see melancholy as a bad feeling. It’s more inviting, relaxing and calm. These aspects come into other shows in the festival in different ways, but also have to do with the energy that people come [with] to see the shows. It’s not only an explosion or a flash, but something deeper.
- Tanz im August Aug 15-31, various locations, details
