Leila Hekmat: Roses Rising – The Movement

Moving between concert, happening, ballet and collective dream, Roses Rising – The Movement transforms Gropius Bau’s atrium into a rhythmic space, where desire collapses into action, politics into prayer and revolution into mime.

A group gathers. The lavish dinner that had just ignited their desire for dissent still reverberates among the self-indulgent women. Now they have become leaders. They have a following. They sing, rant, chant, preach, whirl, whisper, dance, burn incense and frolic with flowers. They want to know: Is this all there is to a revolution? And they want you to join: “Calling all of today's new tribe of teenagers, turned-on children – teeny-boppers and adolescent hippies! Are you tired, rundown, listless? Do you feel the feelings? Corruptible minds and masses – help the helpless, hump the hopeless, heal the hapless.”

With meticulously handcrafted costumes and stage designs, Roses Rising unfolds in Leila Hekmat’s distinctive style, traversing comedy, musical tableau vivant and performance. Developed through extensive research and collected materials on 1970s protest cultures, the work emerges as a performative collage that explores the conscious and unconscious strategies through which people respond to a world in crisis.

Roses Rising is presented as a performance in two parts in collaboration with HAU Hebbel am Ufer. After The Movement at Gropius Bau, the stage production The Dinner will have its premiere at HAU1 on 15 April 2026. The Dinner explores the genesis of The Movement through staging the decadent dinner party that preceded the uprising.