Performing Arts Season

Following on 12 and 13 November, Albanian-born Greek-based theatre maker Mario Banushi returns to Haus der Berliner Festspiele after being part of the festival Performing Exiles in 2025. Banushi shows his latest piece, MAMI, as its German premiere. As his personal mythology, this work, a visual poem and a landscape of memories, depicts the source of life and is a tribute to the women who nurtured us.

What is more, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker returns to her roots with the new creation GLA55, which will have its world premiere at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele on 19 November, with further performances on 20 and 21 November. The Ictus Ensemble and Bl!ndman revisit early works by the master of minimalism, Philip Glass, while Rosas dancers let a geometric choreography unfold, guiding our consciousness into a trance-like dimension.

In December, you can see two bold dance pieces. Belgian-French choreographer Damien Jalet brings Planet [wanderer] on 4 and 5 December, inspired by Japan’s Genesis story, the Kojiki. Alongside the overwhelming organic stage set by the Japanese sculptor, Kohei Nawa, it discusses the boundary between the living and the dead, and the inseparable relationship between the human body, the elements of the cosmic world, and gravity.

Canadian leading choreographer, Marie Chouinard, on the other hand, highlights on 9 and 10 December an evening consisting of her early masterpiece and her latest piece: The Rite of Spring, a piece of music that has inspired legendary artists to create groundbreaking choreographies in each epoch, and MAGNIFICAT, which is one of the eight most ancient Christian hymns and is the canticle most frequently recited. What defines both works is that they are subject to her sublime and exquisite choreography. 

Dumb Type, Japan’s leading multimedia performance collective, presents their latest performance work, 2020, from 15 to 17 January. This has been a phantom work, which they almost completed and planned to premiere in March 2020 as the first work after 18 years but was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic; only a recorded version was presented. Berliner Festspiele present the European premiere in January 2027 right after the now live world premiere at ROHM Theatre Kyoto. AI, surveillance society, communication failure, the climate crisis, geopolitics – the performance explores these threats to humanity in the liminal space between technology and the living body.

After being a part of the 2025/26 Performing Arts Season and being nominated for the 2024 Theatertreffen, we are pleased to welcome again Franco-Austrian artist, choreographer and director Gisèle Vienne on 21 and 22 January with her new creation CREATION 2026 (WT) and Berliner Festspiele co-production (world premiere at Schauspielhaus Zürich). In this first collaboration with the writer Marie NDiaye, Vienne articulates the contemporary concerns and the struggles for a dignified and viable life for all, embodying the long-standing research into power relations and their construction.

Through these prominent contemporary expressions of performing arts and while bringing back to mind fundamental meanings of performativity, we might find that the performing arts exist as neither mere entertaining nor healing, but as a device that shapes our profound perception and thinking about the world, and furthermore, generates and changes it. The theatre has been over time and will continue to be an actual space: a place for people to come together. At the same time, the experience of theatre is a phenomenon that cannot be repeated and exists only in the here and now. Let’s share this unique time together and encounter different people and perspectives in the upcoming edition of the Performing Arts Season, which coincides with the Berliner Festspiele’s 75th anniversary year.