Marina Abramović's twenty-year journey from a video of women baring themselves to scare away storms has become a four-hour durational epic with dozens of performers, and Gropius Bau — sitting in the shadow of the Topography of Terror — is the next building asked to hold it.
At Berliner Ringtheater, Palestinian-German artist Mudar Al-Khufash splits his audience into groups and hands them instructions to perform the mechanisms of erasure in real time — while a camera documents their complicity, turning spectatorship into evidence.
A ballet about Rudolf Nureyev, created under political duress at the Bolshoi and banned under Russia's "gay propaganda" law, has defected to Staatsballett Berlin — where it now plays to sold-out houses filled with exiles for whom a story of choosing freedom over complicity is not metaphor but memoir.
At Dock Art Theater, Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor open The Third Dance with Mahler, flowers, and a record player — then spend the rest of the evening dismantling every sentimental shorthand two decades of partnership have taught them to see through.
Miet Warlop's One Song lands in Berlin with a singer on a treadmill, a cheerleader keeping time, and sixty minutes of a single composition that degrades, frays, and refuses to stop — a palimpsest of twenty years of grief and endurance disguised as the greatest gig you'll never survive.
At Radialsystem V, composer Luxa M. Schüttler turns snare drums and a cast of twenty-odd performers into a collective queer soundscape for MaerzMusik 2026, testing whether noise — unwanted sound, unwanted desire — can become a form of life in a building that once existed to flush the city's waste away.
Kinga Varga's *Kompt* asks what a body becomes after the person inside it leaves — not metaphorically, but physically — and DART Dance Company brings that unsettling proposition to Berlin for a single night as part of SHADE 22.
At eighty-three, Katalin Ladik brings her five decades of vocal extremity to LEVY Galerie in Berlin — a rare chance to stand inside the acoustic force of a body that treats language as something to be dismantled, swallowed, and screamed back into the room.
Hamburger Bahnhof sends Annika Kahrs' interrogations of musical machinery into six Berlin venues that have nothing in common except the power to make sound behave differently — from the instrument vitrines of the Musikinstrumenten-Museum to the Protestant reverb of the Heilige-Geist-Kirche to the Kantine am Berghain.
At Theater Strahl, poets and dancers don't share a stage so much as contest it — scored by a crowd that has to invent its own criteria for judging a body against a word.