SUBMERGE your style – Workshop & Battle

We launch this year’s festival with a free two-hour dance workshop. Merging breaking, experimental, and contemporary styles, MR. KRISS gets us moving and battle-ready.

LAKE STUDIOS then hosts the evening in collaboration with OPEN YOUR MIND: Dancers, bring your technical skills, your thoughtful gestures, your abstract states, and your brave hearts! We will mix styles, music and surprise prompts in a spirit of dance celebration. Winner takes home a residency at LAKE Studios Berlin. Dive in!

SUBMERGE EMERGE – Workshop & Public Space

On Sunday, we continue the celebrations! SUBMERGE will EMERGE beyond the studios and activate movement in public and natural spaces. Join a preparatory workshop at LAKE, and then spread around Friedrichshagen. All participants get a free SUBMERGE T-shirt! Workshop attendance is mandatory, please be on time and bring your swim gear!

ON HOW TO BE NATURE — lab

A durational laboratory using movement, sensory practice, and collective reflection as tools for ecological inquiry. In the garden, participants explore eco-somatic relationships with soil, trees, water, and air. In the studio, choreography and performance unfold in dialogue with natural materials, exploring how the embodiment of this materiality moves the body through states, images, and reflections.

TO CRITTER — performance

To Critter is an eco-sensual invitation to transcend the boundaries of the human self and connect with what lies beyond the skin. Drawing from Traditional Ecological Knowledge and a year of ecosomatic practices in Berlin’s forests, the work explores entanglement and biological interdependence as embodied practice.

IMPROVISATORY WORLD BUILDING — lab

Participating artists will join Kia S. Smith and South Chicago Dance Theatre in research and “improvisatory world building”. During this process, artists will be immersed in learning to trust the instinctual and child-like play of the creative process exploring text, sound, gesture and contemporary movement rooted in wonder, imagination and joy.

SUITE ON THE SAHARA — performance

Suite On The Sahara weaves sounds from Argentina, Morocco, Spain, and Italy to immerse audiences in a landscape flowing with light, color, passion, and a range of movement vocabularies. Scaffolded by the genius of the Silk Road Ensemble, the work allows music — Smith’s first love — to be at the helm of the choreographic process.

BETWEEN DANCING AND FIGHTING — lab

This workshop connects contemporary dance, Qi Gong, Kung Fu, and partner work inspired by wrestling and boxing. Martial art principles become a shared language for listening and receiving — creating a rooted physical conversation between bodies and introducing an organic flow between individual practice and playful interaction with others.

WHERE THE BOYS ARE — performance

Where the Boys Are (13+) playfully explores the intersection of dance and martial arts. Examining and reconstructing the vocabulary of different fighting practices, the two performers transform the arena into a zone of sensitive and intimate action, and expose different perspectives on relations between young men.

BABY IT’S COMEDT — lab

This workshop explores comedy as a self-empowering performance tool. How can comedy create space to talk, perform, and dance about what is difficult to address in an ableist world? Through writing and performance exercises, we share our comical journey. Let’s laugh and generate some energy. People with marginalizing experiences are especially welcome. German Sign Language (DGS) integrated.

BABY I’M SICK TONIGHT — performance

From the perspective of a queer woman of color with chronic illness, Olivia Hyunsin Kim experiments with stand-up comedy as a form of self-empowerment. Using dance, narrative, stand-up, and pop, she and her collaborators counter stigmatization of invisible disability while connecting the cultural history of hysteria, queer illness, and body image in contemporary dance.

OBSESSION AND PERSPECTIVES — lab

In this workshop, participants explore obsession as a movement practice using a basketball as a prop representing power. How does fixation on an object shape our perspective, our movement, and our relationship to spectators? And how can we free ourselves from such obsession — and when we are indeed free, what does it feel like?

POWER/TRIP — performance

In power/trip, a yellow basketball becomes a physical representation of power. The performer embarks on a solitary journey through powerlessness, sudden authority, obsessive control, and the constraints that follow. Through releasing obsession, they find liberation and inner strength. Yet the power trip is a loop, inevitably pulling them back to the beginning.

THRESHOLD DIVE — lab

In this workshop we use improvisational tasks to explore the sound of voice and character-building around the mythical figure of the Afro-Caribbean mermaid. We will visit existing literature on the subject and create new narratives born from guided improvisational tasks.

ORÁCULO — performance

Oráculo is a dance theatre piece that explores afrofuturism and the migration journeys of the mythical Afro-Caribbean mermaid figure.

INSIDE JOURNEY — lab

This workshop combines reflection, improvisation, and repertory, offering a practical and embodied understanding of the creative process behind Gig. Through guided tasks, we translate biographical material, personal memories, and reflections into movement and spatial composition. Improvisation with written text and voice follows, navigating structure and spontaneity. We close by learning a short sequence from the piece itself.

GIG — performance

Gig offers an intimate look at the precarious reality of freelance dance artists. Blending dance, spoken text, and direct address, the solo examines the gig economy’s demands against a post-pandemic backdrop of rising costs and shrinking cultural funding. Drawing from her experience as a migrant artist, Pamela Moraga navigates labor, exhaustion, and identity with vulnerability and wit.

FLIGHT LAB — lab

Engaging our imagination, we dive into our own superhero characters, exploring and expressing our inner plurality. By queering the superhero, we investigate what its body and movements can mean for each of us—seeking empowerment, play, curiosity, and discovery. We share elements of partnering practice, centering agency and consent, and expand material from the piece toward flying together.

SUPER WE, SUPER ME — performance

What kind of superheroes do we need today? In a colorful fantasy world, Elastrix and Stromax adventure on a distant planet, each tasked with protecting their magical home — but with opposing superpowers. When they meet, they discover they can fly higher together than ever before. Made for young audiences aged 5+, the work invites us to discover our own superpowers and encounter fellow superheroes around us!

EMBODIED MYTH — lab

How do the stories we tell affect our sense of body? Through variations on games like charades, we embody stories from daily life, exploring how movements and gestures come to hold meaning. Drawing on dance, physical theater, and somatic practice, we take on the role of the mythologist, investigating how our bodies are organized by shared narratives and habits.

MYTHOLOGIES — performance

Mythologies is a performance event about the ways we story our experiences and how storytelling shapes our relationship with the world and ourselves. The audience is invited to share stories; as these stories become dances, they enter the wobbly terrain of embodiment, their meaning and sense-making unravelling. Stories slip and crack, scandalizing and disturbing the narratives our bodies have come to hold.

ROOTS IN MOTION — lab

Koffi-Kégou Afiadegnigban invites participants to explore contemporary dance through a choreographic vocabulary rooted in Togolese dance tradition. Drawing on danced rituals reinterpreted in a contemporary style, the workshop familiarizes participants with the fundamentals of Togolese dance (anchoring, musicality, symbolism) while experimenting with tools for contemporary dance creation.

LA QUATRIÈME — performance

La Quatrième is a spiritual journey on which I embarked to reconnect with my history, revive my demons and exorcise them. While drifting back in time, I try to question my past, understand my present and better prepare for my future.

ABOUT DANCE — forming futures — forum
DECOLONIZING NON-VIOLENT COMMUNICATION

ABOUT DANCE – forming futures is an exchange forum for professional dance and performance artists that addresses themes of precarity and possibility in the dance and performance sphere. Each forum is structured and hosted by invited guest artists. The format of the forum is intended to be experimental, interactive, and grounded as much in discussion as in movement. Building on last year’s forum, this special edition will be hosted by Siegmar Zacharias, tackling the decolonisation of non-violent communication.