Performing Arts Season 2025/26: Full Programme Announced and Start of Ticket Sales
In its third edition, this programme series presented by the Berliner Festspiele focusses on differing notions of identity and how these are interrelated with the world. From October 2025 to January 2026, it offers guest performances of seven international dance, theatre and performance productions at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele and the Gropius Bau, including two world premieres, one European and two German premieres.
The season opens with the boldly visual and powerfully poetic music theatre production “The Great Yes, The Great No” by William Kentridge, whose German premiere in June at the Ruhrfestspiele was received with great acclaim. The Akram Khan Company presents the German premiere of its most recent production “Thikra: Night of Remembering”, which brings together an international and all-female cast trained in contemporary and Bharatanatyam dance. This creation is the company’s final touring production and marks the end of its 25-year existence. For the European premiere of her new work “Post-Orientalist Express” the choreographer Eun-Me Ahn takes a deep dive into the rich traditions of Asia and offers a vibrant and colourful perspective on cultural identity. “Showroomdummies #4” by Gisèle Vienne and Étienne Bideau-Rey blends dance, theatre and the visual arts. Together with François Chaignaud and the singer Nadia Larcher, Nina Laisné explores the richness of South American folklore as the basis of a contemporary discourse in “Último helecho”. After a break of almost three years, Thorsten Lensing creates the world premiere of a new stage play together with his distinguished ensemble with “Tanzende Idioten” (Dancing Idiots). To coincide with the exhibition at the Gropius Bau, Ligia Lewis will present “Wayward Chant”, a work conceived specially for the Atrium that is also presented as a world premiere.
The full programme, curated by YusukeHashimoto, is published on the website. Tickets go on sale today at 14:00 h. Accreditation is possible as of now.
October
William Kentridge, one of South Africa’s most acclaimed interdisciplinary artists, opens the Performing Arts Season from 16 to 18 October with his boldly visual Gesamtkunstwerk “The Great Yes, The Great No”, a piece of theatre, an oratorio and a chamber opera all rolled into one. Using drawings, collages, films and masks as well as music, dance and performance, the play, which is based on the real-life events of an historical sea voyage from Marseille to Martinique in 1941, tells a complex story about exile, migration, colonialism and barbarism. In the process, the boundaries between reality and fiction become blurred and historical and literary periods are superimposed: along with historically documented passengers such as the writer Anna Seghers and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, numerous additional characters can also be found on board, including the psychiatrist and political thinker Frantz Fanon, the painter Frida Kahlo and the sisters Paulette and Jeanne Nardal, who were pioneers of the French Négritude movement. The symbolic power and multiple levels of a journey at sea unite all the travellers. In eight different languages the performers, singers, dancers and musicians take the audience along on their very particular sea voyage.
November
The oasis of Al-Ula in the Saudi Arabian desert with its broad skies and traces and echoes of ancient rituals inspired Akram Khan to create “Thikra: Night of Remembering”. It was here that this work, a co-production with the Berliner Festspiele, was created and celebrated its world premiere in January 2025: on 11 & 12 November its indoor adaptation will be presented at Berliner Festspiele as a German premiere. This is the final touring production by the Akram Khan Company and marks the conclusion of its 25-year existence. 14 dancers from different traditions – classical Indian Bharatanatyam and contemporary Western dance – come together in one choreography and allow cultures, traditions and perspectives to flow together to the original score by the Indian American composer Aditya Prakash. In collaboration with his ensemble, the British choreographer Khan explores the universal questions of female forebears along with their rituals and movement languages. This creation was developed in collaboration with the Saudi Arabian visual artist Manal AlDowayan, who created the scenography and costumes.
In her dance production “Post-Orientalist Express”, premiered in Seoul in May 2025, Eun-Me Ahn takes an incisive yet playful look at romanticised Western ideas of Asia. With her brightly coloured and life-affirming visual language, the South Korean choreographer juxtaposes these clichés with elements from legends and pop culture, thereby emphasising their inherent contradictions. A unique movement vocabulary reappraises the around 90 costumes and music from a variety of traditional and neo-traditional cultures and interprets them from a contemporary perspective. The European Premiere of the work, also a co-production with the Berliner Festspiele, can be seen in the festival theatre on 15 & 16 November.
In her new work conceived for the Atrium at the Gropius Bau, “Wayward Chant”, the Berlin-based artist and choreographer Ligia Lewis explores the overlap between beauty and desperation by mobilising a chorus. The result is a reduced score made up of singing, moving bodies in detailed formations. The choreography resembles a church hymn that is hummed hesitantly, and develops into a sonic and physical game of dissonance and echoes. Early Western liturgical sounds are interwoven with blues-like melodies and harmonic details, turning into an atmospheric response to a reverberating past. The performance will receive its world premiere on 28 & 29 November at the Gropius Bau.
With her expansive interdisciplinary practice, Ligia Lewis is a central figure in redefining performance within the context of the visual arts. As an Artist in Focus of the Berliner Festspiele in 2025, she was part of the festival MaerzMusik with a concert performance, and will be represented with an exhibition at the Gropius Bau from 16 October.
December
In their dance theatre performance Gisèle Vienne and Étienne Bideau-Rey explore images of femininity and power structures and challenge the audience to question how they look at the embodied and the disembodied, presence and absence. In “Showroomdummies #4” Japanese performers and life-sized puppets encounter each other as living creatures and inanimate objects. The slow-motion choreography is conceived in dialogue with the original music by Peter Rehberg, a pioneer of the electronic music of the 1990s and founder of the cult label Editions Mego.
For over twenty years, her work on “Showroomdummies” has formed a consistent thread running through the oeuvre of Gisèle Vienne. Together with the artist, puppeteer and director Étienne Bideau-Rey she has repeatedly varied and redirected the performance in a series of independent works, each with their own focus.
“Showroomdummies #4” premiered in 2020 at the ROHM Theatre Kyoto is the most recent version in the series and its German premiere will be presented on 5 & 6 December.
January
After a break of around three years, Thorsten Lensing presents the world premiere of his latest self-written play “Tanzende Idioten” (Dancing Idiots) – with texts by the US-American author Denis Johnson and original quotations from NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon – on four evenings from 15 to 18 January at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. His long-term artistic collaborators Sebastian Blomberg, André Jung, Ursina Lardi, Karin Neuhäuser and the percussionist Willi Kellers play survivors on the way to the next catastrophe. What distinguishes them is a ludicrous combination of brutality and tenderness, anarchy and metaphysical instincts, the pain of existence and lust for life. This co-production continues the Berliner Festspiele’s collaboration with the Berlin-based director and author Thorsten Lensing that began last year.
To complete the programme, on 24 & 25 January there is a chance to see the Berliner Festspiele co-production “Último helecho” by the artists Nina Laisné, François Chaignaud and Nadia Larcher, a performance that is equally reliant on music, song and dance. The Baroque meets South American folklore and mythology: while the trained dancer François Chaignaud also sings on stage, the Argentinian singer Nadia Larcher, a star across Latin America, attempts to join him in folk dances from her homeland for the first time. Ranging from chamamé and the majestic zamba all the way to malambo, the diverse repertoire of traditional Argentinian music and dance provides the bedrock of the performance. The duo will be accompanied by six musicians performing live on stage.
In the framing programme, in addition to lectures, a dance workshop for beginners with Eun-Me Ahn and one for advanced dancers with François Chaignaud will be offered at Tanzfabrik Berlin.
Press Images are available to download in the Press Section of the website.
Funding & Media Partners
The dance performances “Post-Orientalist Express”, “Showroomdummies #4” and “Último helecho” are presented with support from Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels. “Showroomdummies #4” is supported by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan, through the Japan Arts Council.
Media Partners: radio3 (vom rbb), ARTE, Dussmann das KultuKaufhaus, Monopol – Magazin für Kunst und Leben, Der Tagesspiegel, WALL und Yorck Kinogruppe.
Press Contact
Sara Franke & Anna Hinz
T +49 30 254 89 269 / 132
presse@berlinerfestspiele.de