Programme Preview 2025/26

The opening in October is marked by William Kentridge’s visually and poetically powerful music theatre production “The Great Yes, The Great No” (2024). Inspired by an event in 1941 when intellectuals and artists – including André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Anna Seghers – landed in Martinique in order to flee Vichy France, the work tells a story of exile, migration and colonialism. Blending the surreal and the historical through masks and animated collages while gathering dancers, performers, chorus members and instrumentalists in a web of different musical styles – especially African and Caribbean – the audience witnesses how the cultural voices of the avant-garde are ferried on a ghost ship through time into the present.

In November, choreographer Akram Khan presents his new work “Thikra: Night of Remembering” (2025), co-produced by the Berliner Festspiele. In this latest production from Akram Khan Company, the past and present converge in a journey through tradition, honouring ancestors and the power of rituals. Khan draws inspiration from diverse cultures that engage in these sacred practices, bringing together an all-female international cast of Bharatanatyam and contemporary dancers. With scenography and costume design by award-winning visual artist Manal AlDowayan, “Thikra: Night of Remembering” explores contemporary identity while affirming ancestral presence, and invites us to reflect on the rituals that have shaped our shared humanity.

For her new creation, “Post Orientalist Express” (2025), a co-production of the Berliner Festspiele and to be presented in November, choreographer Eun-Me Ahn delves deep into Asia’s rich traditions and fluid movements, offering a new and colourful perspective of cultural identity that goes beyond traditional and modern dichotomies. Rooted in shamanic rituals and trained in contemporary dance in both Korea and the United States, Ahn tackles clichés only to twist and exaggerate them into absurdity, presenting “forbidden Orientalist fantasies reimagined”.

Artist, choreographer, dancer and director Ligia Lewis will present „Wayward Chants“, her new performative work especially designed for the Gropius Bau atrium, in November. Lewis sees choreography as the movement of ideas across bodies, meticulously conceived, crafted and directed – a political act, a writing against the grain of the racial regime of representationalism and (Black) erasure. In a collaboration with the Gropius Bau, her performance will be shown in parallel with her video installations, which will be located in neighbouring rooms.

Initially created in 2001, Gisèle Vienne’s and Étienne Bideau-Reys’ “Showroomdummies” has traversed more than two decades of re-writing. Based loosely on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus in Furs” (1870), the piece mixes dance, theatre and visual arts, focusing on domination-based relationships and the frontier between living and nonliving bodies, connecting coldness and sensuality. In this fourth edition “Showroomdummies #4” (2020), six female Japanese performers unite with Vienne’s life-sized puppets, reflecting on the evolution of Vienne’s aesthetics and subjects during the previous two decades. The piece will be presented in December.

Pursuing her hybrid work mixing visual art, musical references and virtuosic dances, Nina Laisné embarks on a new endeavour with her long term collaborator, the performer and choreographer François Chaignaud and the Argentinian singer, composer and author Nadia Larcher. For “Último helecho”, a Berliner Festspiele co-production to be presented in January, the trio have explored the richness of South American folklores as the vibrant foundation for a contemporary conversation. Drawing from genres like zamba, huayno and malambo, the work intertwines vocal and physical expression – without one dominating the other – evoking memory and reconfiguring cultural narratives.

After starting a long-term collaboration with the Performing Arts Season 2024/25, Thorsten Lensing will present the world premiere of his new play “Tanzende Idioten” (Dancing Idiots) in January. The characters – portrayed by Sebastian Blomberg, André Jung, Ursina Lardi and Karin Neuhäuser – are marked by an absurd mixture of brutality and tenderness, of existential dread and joie de vivre. Co-produced by Berliner Festspiele, this piece is part of another focus of the Performing Arts Season, which is on supporting the creation of new works.