Lake Studios Berlin

PROGRAM SCHEDULE
—

DAY 1: 16 AUGUST, 12-20H
12h Performance: Siegmar Zacharias
13 – 14h Movement intervention: Jule Flierl
14 – 15h Lunch
15 – 18h How do we work through conflict: Siegmar Zacharias
18 – 19:30h Break
19:30h Dinner


DAY 2: 17 AUGUST, 11-18H
11 – 13h How to Sustain Momentum / Mental Health: Luísa Saraiva
13 – 14h Lunch
14 – 16h How to Sustain Momentum / Mental Health, PART 2
16 – 18h Social Body Apothecary Clinic — invitation to collective rest and care: Siegmar Zacharias

PROGRAM DETAILS AND DESCRIPTIONS
—

Trainings for Political Imaginaries offers cultural workers vital tools to navigate personal, professional, and political crises with resilience and vision. In this time of fragmentation, we explore how to sustain momentum and mental health while staying attuned to grief, rage, and collective possibility. Through decolonising Non-Violent Communication, we challenge extractive norms of “neutrality” and learn to speak from interdependence. With the Social Body Apothecary we turn to plants as allies and guides—reminding us how to metabolise loss and nurture thriving. We invite you to ground, feel, connect, and imagine otherwise. For those working at the edges of culture, conflict, and care. hosted by: Siegmar Zacharias, Jule Flierl, Luisa Saraiva, Freelance Dance Ensemble, and LAKE Studios Berlin.

Performance: Siegmar Zacharias
I Don’t Want to Swallow Anymore is an improvisation that engages the materiality of speech, the effort of speaking up and the commitment to stay with processes even when they pose discomfort. This somacoustic drooling lecture addresses labour, solidarity, and indigestion. Things we cannot swallow and stomach anymore.

Movement intervention: Jule Flierl
This practice aims at empowering our voices, bodies and minds. Through expanded voice techniques, slogans and collective movement, we will experience demanding, rejecting and practicing solidarity for situations of protest.

How do we work through conflict: Siegmar Zacharias
Non-Violent Communication (NVC), while powerful, often reflects colonial norms—centering neutrality, politeness, and individualism over embodied truth, relational accountability, and structural awareness. This workshop invites you to decolonise NVC by rooting communication in the body, history, and interdependence. We’ll explore how to meet conflict not with avoidance, but with presence—especially in times of crisis and polarization. Through somatic practices and collective dialogue, we’ll unlearn habits of dominance masked as “peace,” and build tools for courageous, relational conflict work. This is a space to feel, speak, and listen in ways that honour complexity, connection, and the transformative potential of discomfort.

How to Sustain Momentum / Mental Health: Luísa Saraiva
The workshop offers a supportive space to explore, understand, and manage anxiety and emotional exhaustion. We know the dance world can be incredibly demanding: from constantly fluctuating work, unpredictable conditions, and the pressure to keep up financially and creatively. It’s common to feel drained and disconnected from your goals, especially when these feelings pile up over time. This workshop will focus on deepening self-awareness and developing practical tools for emotional resilience.

Social Body Apothecary Clinic — invitation to collective rest and care: Siegmar Zacharias
Come be nourished by the allyship of plants. We invite you into conversation about your struggles, how they tie into the places you inhabit and the places you are from. Through storytelling, herbal knowledge, and gentle inquiry, you’ll meet plants as companions, allies, and guides through grief, overwhelm, and transition. We’ll explore how the social body—its wounds, pressures, and histories—shows up in your personal body, and how tending to the personal can shift how we show up for collective transformation.

BIOGRAPHIES
—

Jule Flierl explores the interconnection of voice and dance through the lens of somatic and expanded voice techniques, voice philosophy, contemporary dance and historic examples of voicing dance-makers. She works on audiovisual choreography (“Operation Orpehus” 2015, “Störlaut” 2018, “Inner Mining” 2025 a.o..), teaches TonTanz workshops in European Festivals and Universities, and collaborates with Irena Z. Tomažin (live performance “U.F.O. – Hommage to Katalin Ladik” 2021 and LP “U.F.O.” 2024) and Antonia Baehr (live performance and film “Die Hörposaune” 2022 and museum performance “Tontänze” 2023) a.o. Jule graduated from SEAD Salzburg, holds an MA in choreography at EXERCE Montpellier and is a certified teacher of the somatic voice method “Lichtenberger Methode”. juleflierl.weebly.com

Luísa Saraiva is a choreographer and performer born in Porto, Portugal and living between Porto and Berlin. She studied psychology at the University of Porto and dance at the Folkwang Arts University in Essen. Her choreographic work explores the language of the body and voice and lies at the intersection of movement and musical composition.

Siegmar Zacharias is performer, death-doula, herbalist and researcher. At the intersection of art, radical pedagogy and activism, she develops performances, immersive installations and curatorial encounter spaces that deal with generative ethical dynamics of transformation: Agency, decolonization of knowledge, ecologies of artistic and social practice. She works with humans and more-than-humans, uncontrollable material such as smoke, slime, saliva, the human nervous system and grief. Siegmar is a founding-member of the Freelance Dance Ensemble Berlin, an initiative to build solidarity and create visibility of freelancers in the field of dance in Berlin.