Programme introduction by Ricardo Carmona

Beneath our feet, the ground is never still. Tectonic plates drift slowly – at the same pace that our fingernails grow – pushing and folding continents. This quiet, near-imperceptible motion reshapes the face of the earth – a force that sometimes bursts into seismic tremors.

This year’s festival unfolds like a tectonic landscape – a choreography of shifting ground, where every movement is part of a larger transformation. Just as the earth’s crust bends and breathes, art presses against the boundaries of what we know, opening fissures and creating space for the new. Here, we listen with the soles of our feet, feel with our breath, think with our skin. It is a space shaped not just by what is visible, but also by what is sensed, imagined and remembered – a choreography of relationships and shared urgencies. In the friction of these encounters – between artists, performances and audiences – a fire is kindled. Not one that consumes, rather one that gathers warmth, clarity and courage. A fire that invites us to hold each other through the shifts.

The many works of this year’s festival are fireplaces in themselves, holding and creating communities. Némo Flouret opens the festival with a collective spectacle of fireworks, dance and music. At the same time, nora chipaumire invites us into an imagined private bar, a place where revolutions begin. Similarly, Lia Rodrigues asks how people are shaped and limited by borders. J Neve Harrington, in turn, crafts a kaleidoscopic choreography of bodies, and Clara Furey explores eroticism as a communal force, free of norms. Meanwhile, Outbox Movement brings together diverse dance styles under the open sky, bridging them through movement and dynamic connection.

Much like tectonic activity, dance traditions are in constant transformation, reshaping the terrain of cultural expression. Inka Romaní blends Valencian folk dances with contemporary forms such as breaking and house, while Nguyễn+ Transitory draw from traditional Thai music and dances, queering inherited forms and opening dialogues between the ancestral and the contemporary. In a different way, Adam Linder, Ethan Braun and the Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop look into dance and its structural ties to music. Furthermore, Radouan Mriziga explores the resonance of the desert, rooted in the Amazigh culture of Northern Africa. Ligia Lewis, for her part, establishes a new, utopian vision of belonging beyond the notion of national identity.

Resembling a landscape formed through gradual accumulation, the body as a site of storytelling holds often layers – personal and cultural histories. Marlene Monteiro Freitas brings 1001 stories in a fable-like stream of tales of love, war and freedom. Daniel Mariblanca draws from interviews with trans individuals, and embodies their diversity and wide spectrum of experiences. Meanwhile, Oona Doherty revisits her family’s past through the lens of a working-class boy, and Lovísa Ósk Gunnarsdóttir addresses ageing, as well as the silence around the menopause.

Artists consistently tend to respond to the urgent issues of our time, offering reflections on the shifting landscapes of society, identity and imagination. Moritz Ostruschnjak examines how the growing digitalisation of life reshapes our experiences and what remains of the body in a digitised world. Jeremy Nedd explores the politics of marginalised movement, asking: can a dance move be owned? Xan Dye navigates the paradox of identity and transformation, and Yara Boustany turns to collective imagination as an act of resistance in the face of destruction. Kim Sungyong leads us into the landscape of the jungle, where metaphor and memory intertwine, inviting contemplation on our existence.

Art can shape the world just as tectonic plates do – but only when given space. Censorship, repression and fear try to harden the surface and seal the cracks. In the face of rising authoritarianism and neo-fascism across the world, guarding freedom of expression becomes an urgent task. Let us stay with the cracks, keep the dialogue open and protect the right to fracture – to dissent, to be many. The performances in this year’s festival resemble open fault lines – creating tremors, bringing hidden layers to the surface, and shaping the world to come.

The ground is moving, and we are moving with it.

Ricardo Carmona
Artistic director & Tanz im August team 
April 2025

Greeting by Annemie Vanackere

Comparisons between natural and cultural surroundings are not new. How could they be? Nature and culture have been deeply interwoven since time immemorial; we also know that there are no sharp boundaries between human and ‘other-than-human’ conditions. Thus the concept of ecology – as a study of the interactions between organism species, of the total economy of nature – also can be applied to culture and society.

There are times when ecology in a metaphorical sense is more needed than usual; times in which human activity just seems destructive for the future, for other humans as well as for the whole environment. We don’t need keywords like war and increasing militarization, the rightward shift and demolition of democracy, climate catastrophe, and patriarchal backlash to make the extent of all sorts of destruction clear to us. What is to be done? Where do we go with our feelings of loss and grief, with our need for hope and solidarity? Where can we recharge our batteries and find joy? Even if it might sound overly simplistic: in the very diverse spaces of art and culture! And I think dance plays a very special role here, because it embodies an ecology all its own.

In recent months, the concept of the ‘ecology of the cultural landscape’ has received a new, striking resonance. In times of austerity politics, if we don’t take care, more fragile but equally essential elements of this landscape will disappear. Then it will lose its balance, and the diversity and wealth of culture would go down the drain. And along with it, a part of our humanity. Particularly in dance – and in the performing arts in general – the thought of it makes me shiver. We will not notice it immediately – just like the tectonic movements that Ricardo Carmona speaks of in the foreword to his third festival, are also hardly tangible at first.

Just like the shifts, distortions and frictions in world politics and among us inhabitants of this planet are grinding louder and louder, so is the structure of cultural institutions, artists, cooperations and alternative spaces shaking. It cannot be ruled out that this shaking might be the origin of positive change, or might let new things emerge. At the moment, however, the concern that the cultural ecology will slide out of balance is dominating.

And yes: friction also generates heat! We can get still closer to each other through dance, through art. And I cherish and nurture the hope that the spaces that are needed for this will remain preserved. We from HAU are doing everything we can to make our contribution. Who would like to imagine a summer without the ‘tectonic plate’ of the festival Tanz im August? Every year it shifts very slowly, so that new temporalities are created again and again, and that in addition to the discovery of slowness we can also experience acceleration, surprising effects and entertainment in the best way. Experiences that allow us to forget time through sheer fascination. Phenomena of suddenness like fireworks that catch us by surprise like the eruption of a volcano.

I would like to thank all the participating artists and their teams who make these common experiences possible. Without our partners, Tanz im August could not reach as many people at so many locations: a big thank you to the Berliner Festspiele, Sasha Waltz & Guests, Alte Münze Berlin, Kultur Büro Elisabeth, Radialsystem, Sophiensæle, Grün Berlin, Tanzfabrik, Berlin Mondiale, and Making a Difference. We would like to thank our sponsors, above all the federal state of Berlin and the Capital Cultural Fund. They are continuing to support us, HAU Hebbel am Ufer and the festival Tanz im August, in increasingly uncertain times: that gives us hope for stability.

I hope – for you and for us – that we might be able to relearn how to dance on the shifting plates of the present in August 2025. I’m looking forward to it!

Annemie Vanackere
Artistic & managing director HAU Hebbel am Ufer
April 2025