Performing Arts Season

The Berliner Festspiele's Performing Arts Season will be continued: During the autumn and winter months, it has been presenting a panorama of outstanding international productions from dance, theater and performance at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele and the Gropius Bau since 2023. Some of the performances shown are co-produced by the Berliner Festspiele or specially produced in Berlin. The curator of the Performing Arts Season is Yusuke Hashimoto.

From October 2024 to January 2025, the second edition of the series will focus on questions of memory and tradition in contemporary performing arts. One focus will be on the New York dance and performance scene.

Taylor Mac returns to Berlin for the opening of the Performing Arts Season 2024/25 with the European premiere of "Bark of Millions" in October 2024. Following the great success of "24-Decade History of Popular Music" (European premiere at the Berliner Festspiele in 2019), Mac and a 22-member artistic team will bring a four-hour "Rock Opera Meditation of Queerness" to the stage of the Festspielhaus. The epic concert format presents 55 songs directed and written by Taylor Mac and composed by Matt Ray, one for each year since the 1969 New York Stonewall Riots, inspired by queer figures in world history from antiquity to the present day. The dazzling costumes were designed by Machine Dazzle in the style of "Queer Maximalism"; Faye Driscoll choreographed the show and co-directed it with Niegel Smith.

Two avant-garde icons from New York's legendary Judson Dance Theater are also a central part of this Performing Arts Season: Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown. Both were first brought to Berlin in the 1970s by Nele Hertling, who will receive the Berlin Theater Prize from the Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung for her life's work in 2024.

In December 2024, the program includes a production by Lucinda Childs, a leading figure in postmodern American dance. In "Dance " (1979), her famous collaboration with Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt, the minimalism of her work is particularly evident. "Four New Works" is currently in development and consists of four parts, including a solo for Lucinda Childs herself. This evening offers the opportunity to follow the story of a body and a dance company.

A guest performance by the Trisha Brown Dance Company can be seen in January 2025. In 2023, for the first time since the death of its founder in 2017, the company commissioned a choreographer from outside the group to develop new works. This evening consists of three parts: two of the most important choreographies by Trisha Brown herself - "Glacial Decoy" (1979) and "Working Title" (1985) - and the commissioned work "In the Fall" (2023) by the celebrated choreographer Noé Soulier. The inclusion of new choreographers gives an impression of how the memories of a body that are preserved in a dance company are renewed. "In the Fall" can be seen for the first time in Germany.

The performing arts have a fleeting existence that disappears with the end of the performance. This is precisely why they can react in a special way to questions of personal or collective memory, history and tradition. The other contributions to the Performing Arts Season 2024/25 also bear witness to this in one way or another: two plays from Paris and Berlin - by Philippe Quesne and Thorsten Lensing - and two dance productions in German premieres by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Ohad Naharin.

For the brand new "Il Cimento dell'Armonia e dell'Inventione", Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Belgium's most influential choreographer in the field of contemporary dance, is collaborating with the pioneering choreographer Radouan Mriziga from Morocco. Together, they are developing a new work for Keersmaeker's company Rosas to the music of Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons", a masterpiece of Baroque music, which will be performed at the Festspielhaus in October 2024. Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's approach of reading music geometrically and translating it into dance is presented here as an ode to nature. In addition, both choreographers express their concern about the changing and increasingly problematic relationship between humans and their natural environment.

After 16 years, the Batsheva Dance Company returns to the Haus der Berliner Festspiele in January 2025 with a new choreography by Ohad Naharin: "MOMO" came out in Tel Aviv at the end of the year before last and addresses the constant conflict between the archaic, archetypal and autonomous human earthboundness and the modern individual's striving for self-realization and social networking. To music by Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass, among others, a shared passion of grief and beauty unfolds on stage.

The two guest performances will take place in November 2024. First, Thorsten Lensing will bring his latest, self-written play "Verrückt nach Trost" back to Berlin, moving from the Sophiensælen to the main stage of the Festspielhaus. This story about grief, memory and the search for one's own path in life is staged by four great actors: Sebastian Blomberg, André Jung, Ursina Lardi and Devid Striesow.

With "The Garden of Earthly Delights", Philippe Quesne 's latest production - inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych of the same name - his company Vivarium Studio is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The performance is a large-scale, retro-futuristic epic that allows us to imagine the future of the world somewhere between medieval animal worlds, eco-science fiction and modern westerns.

Advance ticket sales for all events start on August 28.