Elisa Frasson

“The ground is moving, and we are moving with it”, writes artistic director Ricardo Carmona. Tanz im August 2025 stays true to this vision: dance as a seismograph of present-day tensions.

Biennale Danza 2025, Myth Makers, staged a landscape of tension and contradiction, where aesthetics collided with both implicit and overt politics.

What to do in a sunless summer? You warm up. Leading Austrian choreographer, director, and performance artist Florentina Holzinger does it in her usual — and perhaps more radical than ever — way: with an orgy, a surgical operation, female bodies dancing, crashing, and rising again.

During the three-day “Reflections & Reflections – On the Future of Debate Culture” programme at the Berliner Festspiele, Emanuel Gat unveiled Freedom Sonata (2024), a work that navigates, both literally and conceptually, the fragile boundary between order and the pursuit of freedom.

A guest of the Berliner Festspiele Performing Arts Season, the Israeli Batsheva Dance Company presented Ohad Naharin’s MOMO (2022), a non-narrative, mesmerising piece, strongly characterised by duality.

Beginning during Berlin Art Week and developing over the following months, the joint curatorship of Sophiensæle, Georg Kolbe Museum, and Haus am Waldsee, presented a retrospective on the body of work of Franco-Austrian choreographer, director, interdisciplinary artist, and puppeteer Gisèle Vienne to Berlin.

When a dance artist can no longer create physical movement, one option is to start again by sewing fabric. The Noa Eshkol. No Time to Dance exhibition at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin offered important insights into what creation can be.

In times of shift towards authoritarianism, militarisation, and planned major funding cuts, Berlin festival Tanz im August, founded just before the Wall came down, is preserving its original spirit to provide an open space for an international and local dialogue.