Programme introduction by Ricardo Carmona

Weather moves through the world like an unseen choreography. It gathers, shifts, and arrives slowly or all at once. Winds redraw ocean routes, heat reshapes land, storms form far away before they reach our doors. The World, like the weather, is in motion. Current fascist tendencies and right-wing governments create political climates that change the conditions: pressure builds, alliances drift, tensions accumulate before breaking like sudden summer thunderstorms. In such times, Art – like the weather – is never background scenery: it is a reciprocal political force that shapes our current state. It imprints and mirrors how we move, feel, and come together.

This year’s festival unfolds like a weather map: shifting currents, warm fronts, and gathering winds. Within this changing climate, encounters between artists, works, and audiences create places of attention and possibility. The festival becomes an atmosphere we inhabit together – where we collectively navigate evolving conditions and move through uncertain winds.

Weather systems do not stop at borders. Winds travel across territories, carrying heat, humidity, beings and dust, from one region to another, reshaping climates along their path. In a similar way, several artists of this year’s festival explore transnational belonging and identity, question the nation state. Joana Tischkau, Jeremy Nedd, and Sophie Yukiko together with the Malpaso Dance Company examine tensions between cultural authenticity and exoticisation, while Mohamed Toukabri traces personal trajectories shaped by language and migration. Marco da Silva Ferreira uses dance vocabularies to resist militarisation, violence, and toxic masculinity, and Outbox Movement creates encounters between diverse dance styles beyond fixed frames. Like air currents, these works move across territories, reimagining belonging as fluid, shared, and continuously in motion.

Weather is also shaped by time. Layers of air hold particles and echoes from distant events, forming clouds shaped by what came before. Several artists approach history not as a fixed narrative, but as a climate that surrounds us. Chara Kotsali revisits history as a series of discontinuities and disappointments. Trajal Harrell treats songs as archived memory, while Calixto Neto reflects on music as an act of resistance and solidarity. En– Knap with Emese Cuhorka, and Csaba Molnár engage with layered references from the Western dance canon, and Kasia Wolińska uses history as a tool for rebirth.

At the current time, the global atmosphere grows increasingly unstable; inhospitable and sudden shifts reshape the geopolitical landscape. The air becomes thinner for many. Agnietė Lisičkinaitė and Igor Shugaleev reflect on the impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Jumana Dabis addresses resilience and instability in Gaza, and Diana Niepce explores bodies in states of conflict and oppression. Ballet national de Marseille / (LA)HORDE uses dance as transgression driven by revolt, while Mélissa Guex develops strategies for navigating a seemingly hopeless present. Like converging weather systems, these works reflect a world in flux: unsettled, interconnected, and searching for new horizons.

Beyond these storms, artists also turn to nature and ecological rhythms as tools of reflection and transformation. Dana Michel explores swimming and its aquatic histories, while Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan with Cheng Tsung-lung evokes landscapes shaped by elemental forces. Simona Deaconescu, Ioana Vreme Moser, and Simina Oprescu draw parallels between the flow of natural water currents and our bodies, while Lenio Kaklea explores bird movements as systems of competition and play. Kareth Schaffer together with Jonas Hauer investigate how bats’ echolocation can become a mode of sensing our environment and perception. In these works, nature is not a backdrop but a dynamic force that invites us to reconsider our place within a shared world.

Nothing settles: not history, not geography, not the present tense. Storms do not arrive as single events but as accumulations, and what seems distant becomes immediate; what seemed stable reveals its fragility. In such a political climate, artistic creations become a way of staying attentive, not outside of the world, but within its pressures. Artistic engagement and collective responsibility emerge as shared orientations for an unstable time.

The festival does not offer resolutions, but a shared passage through the current shifting conditions. And as the weather continues to change, we remain inside it: attentive, implicated, and moving with what moves through us.

Ricardo Carmona – Artistic Director & Tanz im August Team 
May 2026

Greeting by Annemie Vanackere

In seeking inspiration for the visual appearance of this year’s Tanz im August festival, the team immersed itself in the world of weather maps. What they found was a variety of graphic representations which by means of lines, arrows, symbols, and colour scales aim to make complex meteorological data like barometric pressure, temperature and precipitation comprehensible at a glance – whether applicable to the current situation, to the past, or as a prediction of the future. These abstractions – often quite beautiful – render visible phenomena over which we don’t have mastery, or better yet: at whose mercy we find ourselves.

In this spirit, the weather maps emblematize for me a present-day paradox. On the one hand, they’re a product of the Anthropocene (a term that describes human impact on and domination of the earth’s biological, chemical, and geological processes) and thus part of the – patriarchal – fantasy that we human beings are the sole rulers on this planet. On the other hand, what jumps out at us from the colourful depictions is our responsibility for the climate crisis, which – this much we know – has a direct influence on the movement of refugees, social unrest, wars, and economic and political stability. And that can easily make us feel quite helpless.

For many people, in view of the crises and wars of the last few years, a strong feeling of powerlessness has gained the upper hand over the fantasy of omnipotence. The storms of world politics are brewing over us, triggered by processes in which it feels as if we had and have no stake. Perhaps it’s only in Western Europe that people feel shocked by this, and other regions have always felt defenceless in the face of the game of world powers?

We find ourselves exposed to factors that we as individuals cannot control – and perhaps never have been able to control. We need to relearn how to cope with this better. And this is a task art has always set itself. Whether it does so in an emotional and existential way, or a politically activating or philosophical way – art gives us forms for dealing better with these circumstances. At the same time, art – and dance above all! – is dependent on the external conditions in which we produce it, and affected by the political climate and by public funding. For a long time, it seemed one could take fertile soil for granted, but that is no longer the case. Even here, turbulence, turning points, highs, and lows must be observed, in federal politics, but above all in Berlin’s state politics. “Outlook: changeable”, as the weather forecast puts it.

What can we do if we feel like we’re being blown back and forth by the political weather conditions? We can create something contrary to all weather – or better yet with the weather? – that, paradoxically, is stable in its fleetingness: alliances of instants that bring us together for future projects, moments that remain in our memory and endow us with confidence. So that at least those of us – and there are a great many of us – who wish to remain sensitive and united can succeed in staying mobile with and against and in the storm. And dance especially allows us that! For there are still dances to be danced aside of human beings and their fantasies of omnipotence.

I’d like to thank the following people for this motivating point of view: Ricardo Carmona and his colleagues, all the participating artists and their teams, as well as our partners in Berlin without whom Tanz im August would not be able to move as freely as the wind: Berliner Festspiele, Berlinische Galerie, GLS Event Campus Berlin, Grün Berlin, Kultur Büro Elisabeth, Radialsystem, Sophiensaele, Tanzfabrik, and Making a Difference. We also wish to thank our sponsors, first and foremost the State of Berlin, the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, the European Union, as well as the embassies, cultural institutes and councils. They support us, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, and the Tanz im August festival, even in tempestuous times – and in doing so they give us hope that we will endure.

I wish all of you, and us, many happy moments in August 2026, and hope we’ll come together – whatever the weather!

Annemie Vanackere – Artistic & Managing Director HAU Hebbel am Ufer 
May 2026