In Ricardo Carmona’s second year at the festival’s helm, Tanz im August is taking shape around the theme of migration, featuring dance that imagines a borderless world. Conceiving of itself as an “archipelago of affinities”, the two-week festival – which features 46 events and 18 productions, including three world premieres and 10 premieres for Germany – involves many works that do create their own landscape.
Headliner Dorothée Munyaneza’s umuko is named after a tree with red blossoms, known to be both a healer and storykeeper. Staged with a group of young artists whose art has emerged from the Rwandan genocide, it allows a glimpse of a future still budding despite the threat of annihilation.
Mette Ingvartsen builds a half pipe on the stage of the Berliner Festspiele for her headbanging Skatepark, while Amala Dianor’s DUB brings urban dance to that hallowed stage, which they’ve festooned with gigantic stacked cubes. Meanwhile, Jérôme Bel & Estelle Zhong Mengual will offer a kind of lecture and performance on “non human dances” – an attempt to recover dance beyond the anthropocentric – while Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon offers Mycelium a synchronised dance inspired by the complex underground networks of fungi.
Alessandro Sciarroni provides a durational work that the audience can slip in and out of in DREAM. And KOR’SIA, a young group of dancers out of Madrid, are set to take the Volksbühne stage with MONT VENTOUX, a performance inspired by literature (as has become their calling card) – this time by the Italian poet Petrarch’s Ascent of Mont Ventoux.
And the festival itself is practising what it preaches, pushing its own borders; this year, for the first time, it will collaborate with Kraftwerk and Berlin Atonal to put on Jefta van Dinther’s immersive AUSLAND, extending its contemplation of landscapes into the digital realm.
- Tanz im August, Aug 15-31, various locations, details
