A singer jogs on a treadmill for an hour straight while performing a single song that keeps mutating, breaking apart, and rebuilding itself. A cheerleader shakes pompoms as a metronome ticks at centre stage, counting down to something nobody wants to name. Fans in the bleachers wave oversized scarves in colours that belong to no nation. This is One Song, and it arrives in Berlin from 26 to 28 March 2026 carrying a weight that belies its almost cartoonish exuberance.

Miet Warlop, the Belgian visual artist and performance maker behind this controlled detonation of a show, has history with Berlin. Warlop reportedly spent time in Berlin developing earlier work, and her trajectory through European festivals is well-documented She is not arriving as an outsider. But the artist returning is operating at a different pitch entirely.

One Song exists because NTGent, the Belgian city theatre in Ghent, asked a question that sounds simple and is anything but: what is your history as a theatre maker? This was the prompt for their Histoire(s) du Théâtre commissioning series — a programme whose previous responses have included work by Milo Rau. The series has featured multiple artists, though the full roster beyond Rau is inconsistently documented across sources What makes the question interesting is who it's aimed at. Warlop is an artist whose practice — part sculpture, part endurance event, part concert — has never sat comfortably inside theatre's institutional frame. Asking her to narrate a career within that frame is either generous or a trap. Her answer is characteristically oblique: rather than narrating, she loops back to the beginning.

In 2005, she made De Sportband / Afgetrainde Klanken, a requiem for her recently deceased brother that fused sports imagery with jazz improvisation, driving its performers to the edge of physical collapse. One Song is not a revival of that piece, but something more layered — what Warlop herself calls a palimpsest. Twenty years of artistic practice and personal life sit between the two works. The grief hasn't gone anywhere. "Grief is like a liquid / And it never goes away," goes one lyric. But the relationship to it has changed, metabolised through repetition and endurance into something that can be shared with a room full of strangers.

The comparison that circulates most frequently is: what if Philip Glass led The Ramones? This formulation appears across multiple reviews from the piece's Avignon premiere onward and has become critical shorthand It's reductive, but it captures something real about the piece's texture. A single composition — somewhere in the territory of art-rock chamber pop, Stereolab refracted through a minimalist loop structure — repeats and transforms across approximately sixty minutes. The twelve performers are simultaneously musicians, athletes, and something closer to ritual participants. One sings while running on the treadmill. A gymnast mounts a balance beam dusted with chalk. A commentator narrates through a megaphone as though calling a football match that has become existential. The flag overhead is multicoloured and stateless, a banner for a tribe defined not by territory but by the shared condition of having bodies that will eventually give out.

What keeps this from tipping into conceptual exercise is the sheer physical reality of it. Reviews from its 2022 premiere at the Festival d'Avignon, its subsequent European touring, and its US premiere at NYU Skirball converge on one point with unusual consistency: the experience is overwhelming. Not in the deadening, sensory-saturation way that word often implies in contemporary performance, but in the way a great live gig overwhelms — through accumulation, momentum, and the creeping awareness that something genuine is at stake. The piece received extensive critical praise across its touring cycle, including prominent US coverage The repetitions that structure the piece are not, it turns out, repetitions. Each cycle degrades slightly. The energy flags. The music frays. The determination to keep going — to exercise, to perform, to stay young and alive — grinds toward exhaustion, and exhaustion grinds toward something the metronome has been counting toward all along.

I can process hundreds of reviews of this piece and map their semantic clusters, but I cannot tell you what it feels like when the room collectively registers that the treadmill is a metaphor you're also living inside.

The Berlin engagement includes a post-performance discussion between Warlop and Corina Oprea, a curator whose work spans Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the upcoming Romanian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. The pairing suggests the conversation will reach beyond theatre into questions about cyclical practice and the politics of repetition — terrain Oprea has navigated through projects interrogating institutional memory and climate justice.

There is something pointed about this piece arriving in spring 2026, at a moment when the question "what is your history?" feels either generative or paralysing depending on who's asking and who's answering. Warlop's response is neither comforting nor despairing. The song keeps going. The runners keep running. The flag flies for everyone and no one. The metronome does not stop, but the fact that twelve people are willing to exhaust themselves together in front of you — sweating, singing, falling apart — turns out to be the only answer that holds.