On a Sunday morning inside a rehearsal studio at Staatsballett Berlin, a group of dancers sit in a loose circle of chairs. Some rest their hands on their knees. Others stretch their arms overhead or rotate their shoulders slowly as a piano melody drifts through the room. A few have walked in independently; others arrive with canes or are pushed in wheelchairs by a partner. The teachers arrived an hour early to arrange all of this: the room, the seating, the ramp built specially to get everyone through the door.
The invitation to the InTakt class as a journalist came with one condition: to participate.
The first movements were simple. Hands floated upwards. Shoulders rolled forward and back. Around the circle, each dancer interpreted the gesture in their own way: one lifting both arms high above her head, another raising just a wrist, tracing the same arc in miniature. A man in a wheelchair drew the shape with a single finger. Nobody was doing quite the same thing, and that seemed to be entirely the point. When one participant added a theatrical flourish, the room dissolved into laughter.
The moment they go into the studio, they’re dancers.
Across the circle, Soraya Bruno moved through the exercises as she directed. She’s the reason the class exists at all. Bruno created the programme and has spent years developing inclusive dance workshops in Berlin. “The moment they go into the studio,” she says, “they’re dancers.”
After spending much of her career as a professional dancer, Bruno turned towards education and community work. The idea for the InTakt class emerged while she was training with the Royal Academy of Dance in 2016, researching ways to connect with the wider community. An article about the English National Ballet’s Dance for Parkinson’s programme caught her attention.
“Then I discovered that Mark Morris has a programme in the States, running since 2001,” she said. “When I saw the people, what they did with the movements, how free they were, even when they were very restricted in mobility, first of all, I got tearful, because I was really inspired by them. And then I was like: I want to do that.” She returned to Berlin, founded her own organisation and spent eight years running the class independently – a feat that eventually wore her down. “As a foundation, you have to do all that for free. And after eight years, it gets really tiring.” Last year, Henriette Köpke, administrator at Tanz ist KLASSE! – the Staatsballett’s education initiative – got in touch. For Bruno, it was “like a dream come true”.
The move into the Staatsballett building changed something. In the ornate, heavily symbolic world of classical ballet, a circle of chairs and a covered mirror seems like a small rebellion. But Bruno was clear that the artistic environment is part of the point. “The people here have a lot of therapy, a lot of things to do. But the soul isn’t involved,” she stated. “An artistic environment brings everything to the table. And that’s why I’m so happy that we can do this.”
The class is designed for people with Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis, two conditions that, Bruno explained, require different approaches even within the same room. “MS needs more space and softer movements: more flow, images that make the movement lighter and connect the body in a different way. [People with] Parkinson’s, because of the dopamine, need to get into the rhythm. The movements can be more active, so you just have to adapt.”
Bruno does this, in part, by refusing to set goals. “There’s nothing to achieve in the class,” is a phrase she returns to with the steadiness of a rule. Students can change any movement, take any break, modify anything at any time. What the teachers demonstrate is a guide, not a standard. “You give [the participants], during the class, certain words that are inclusive, words that encourage options.”
Here, we are all the same. Everyone has their own problems. But we’re still a group.
Nobody is singled out or corrected. If Bruno wants a new movement, she invites someone to offer one – “Who would like to share a movement with the group?” – and the class follows from there. She’s also a practitioner of Feldenkrais, a somatic technique that works with the nervous system, and credits it with shaping how she teaches: the attention to word choice, to offering options, to drawing people’s awareness toward parts of their bodies they may have stopped noticing. It is not a medical framework. “We’re not doctors, we’re not physiotherapists,” she made clear. “We’re dancers and artists, and we’re not focused on the disability or the sickness. We’re focused on the person.”
The mirrors lining the studio walls stay covered for most of the session. “One thing is what you feel, which is the most important thing,” she explained, “and the other thing is what you see, and your expectations of yourself in comparison.” She used the mirrors just once, at the end of an improvisation when the whole group was moving together. “I wanted them to see how powerful it was. They were surprised.” The effects of that permission – to move without judgment, without a fixed goal, inside a space built for art rather than treatment – are things the dancers talked about plainly.
One woman, who received her diagnosis only months earlier and travelled over an hour to attend, described finding the class online; she showed up, not knowing what to expect. “I love the dancers,” she expressed afterward. “So good-hearted. It’s important for the exchange – to make friends.” Another had almost talked herself out of coming entirely. “I didn’t want to come here because I only recently got my diagnosis. I didn’t want to see so many people handicapped.” She came anyway, on her doctor’s recommendation. “I’m very proud that I came here by myself.”
Bruno was not surprised by that ambivalence. The sickness, she said, is isolating by nature. “They’re mostly at home, going to therapy, coming home, because of the restrictions.” What the class offers, beyond movement, is a reason to leave the house. “The sense of belonging, the sense of having a community: this is what they enjoy the most. I see how motivated they are to come to the class to see their friends, to dance with their friends.”
Partners – friends, family members, carers who come alongside a participant – are woven into the choreography rather than seated at the edge of it. “This person has to dance. They can’t watch,” Bruno said. “[Having a partner there] brings a very nice experience, to bond in a different setting, an artistic setting.” The range of bodies in the room, she argued, is itself part of the experience. “I get inspired by how you use your chest when you move, even if you can’t move your arms.” Someone who can stand moves differently from someone in a wheelchair, who moves differently from someone using a chair for balance. None of that is a problem to be managed. It is, she suggested, the whole idea.
When the session ended, no one left immediately. Coffee and pastries appeared. People brought their own cakes; the generosity of the class extended in every direction. People lingered across the studio in small clusters, the social exchange built deliberately into the structure of the afternoon, lasting as long as the class itself.
Bruno described a dancer who now uses imagery from the sessions in his daily life, conjuring the sensation of a feather while doing tasks at home. Another told her that he had frozen on the way to the bank – a common experience with Parkinson’s – and heard the counts from a jazz exercise running in his head. “Five, six, seven and go.” It got him moving.
Several dancers came to find me before I left. One described the physical experience of being in the room with an exactness that was hard to argue with. When she arrives, she said, her muscles feel so stiff; it’s as though someone is holding her, stopping her from moving freely. “But then when the music starts, all the stiffness goes away.” She lives with constant pain. “I can’t remember times when I’m not in pain,” she said. “But in this lesson, I forget for two hours.” She goes to a physiotherapist every day, she explained. She does everything she’s supposed to do. “But here, we are all the same. Everyone has their own problems. But we’re still a group.” Someone else mentioned how the piano moved her. “For me, I was crying,” she said. “When you’re so tense [throughout] the day, it is so nice to come here and let go of your emotions.”
Berlin isn’t an easy city to move through with a body that requires accommodation. The U-Bahn stations with working lifts are outnumbered by those without. Cobblestones cover streets in neighbourhoods that have barely changed since the 19th century. Many buildings, including the Staatsballett, a grand opera house, weren’t built with wheelchairs or mobility aids in mind. Getting into the studio required a specially negotiated elevator, normally off-limits, and a ramp constructed just for this class. An accessible toilet in the building exists but involves a long detour. Elebach admits that it’s imperfect. “We just do what we can.”
The class is currently free, funded by the Friede Springer Foundation, something participants mention with a kind of quiet gratitude, unprompted. Getting here already costs something: accessible transport must be booked weeks in advance. Several people in the room are pensioners for whom even a nominal fee might be a barrier. The fact that it’s free isn’t incidental to what the class is. It’s inseparable from it.
You can enjoy yourself in movement, discover yourself in movement. It’s not elitist.
Bruno and Elebach are frank about how unusual any of this remains in Germany. “We’re very behind,” Bruno said, comparing InTakt to what already exists in the UK and the United States, where programmes like this have been running for decades, with research and methodology to match. In Berlin, the classes happen on Sundays: the only day a studio is free in a building of 2,000 staff. There’s talk of eventually expanding to people with dementia, to older Berliners without many other options. “Dance is for everybody,” Bruno said. “You can enjoy yourself in movement, discover yourself in movement. It’s not elitist.” The gap between that statement and the reality of how dance institutions have historically operated is exactly the gap this class is trying to close. The class’ success, Bruno stated, is easy to define: “When you have your participants coming over and over and over, when they come back, that’s successful for me.”
Before I left, she offered a piece of advice for anyone with Parkinson’s or multiple sclerosis who might be hesitant to join. “Just come and dance with us,” she said. “Let your inner child play.”
You can find out more and register for InTakt at staatsballett-berlin.de
