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17 days of cultural defiance: Sophiensaele’s Tanztage Berlin prepares to ignite

The upcoming Tantztage Berlin festival is expected to wow audiences as budget cuts and hostility threaten the city's cultural scene.

Photo: Harriet Meyer

The 34th edition of Sophiensaele’s “dance days” festival will celebrate Berlin’s dance scene in the face of the ongoing budget cuts and general hostility toward Berlin’s cultural scene from the city’s governing coalition. Even with half the budget, the festival will still be as rich a showcase of choreographic talents as it ever was, featuring 10 shows selected from over 200 submissions across 17 days – a testament to the organising committee’s resourcefulness.

Among the premieres, Auro Orso’s Perreo entre los mundos promises to engage the racialised bodies of reggaeton in a silicon-enlisting performance that transcends worlds and humans, where drag king becomes anticolonial resistance. Shade Therét transports the audience on the peripatetic journey of the vagabond in Daybreak.

Inspired by German writer Rainald Goetz’s wild novel Rave, the dance frenzies of the Great Depression, and rave culture during the Thatcherite dismantling of the UK’s social system, Release the Hounds is Adam Russell-Jones’s attempt to dance through crisis – a timely skill to practise.

Other performances explore dreams, absence and chronic illness, bodily hybridity, and the enigmatic possibility of the naked female body. An exciting lineup to be sure – and a stirring example of what can still be done even as the teeth of defunding bite deep. 

  • Sophiensaele, Sophienstr. 18, Mitte, Jan 9-25, details.