At Ballhaus Berlin, a venue whose walls remember a century of spectacle and suppression, The Velvet Creepers stage a queer circus that treats the Weimar lineage it claims not as costume but as continuity — passed through genocide, erasure, and the complicated freedoms of the post-reunification city.
At Bardo Projektraum in Friedrichshain, Marina Cyrino attaches balloons and DIY preparations to a concert flute until it sounds like a membrane tearing, while the monthly RADAЯ series quietly enters its second year of making room for sounds most programming structures won't accommodate.
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.