‘The intimacy of collision’ deals with the orientalist aesthetic of representation. With a focus on form and rhythm, the work deconstructs "Mid-Eastern folk dances and brings them into a dialogue with contemporary movement vocabulary. In this way, the piece forms a dancing body that shakes and breaks up orientalist worlds of imagination. Three performers draw on the rhythmic structures of the Dabke and the cyclical repetitions of the Baladi and thus create a dance that oscillates between anger and solemnity. The project addresses the many variations of Dance of the Seven Veils, an orientalist spectacle first presented in 1893 in Oscar Wilde's play Salome. The intimacy of collision examines how friction, collision, and encounter can serve as strategies to question the orientalism that has shaped the perception of bodies in more than a century of Western imagination.

FAGGOT*S is the first authorized theatrical adaptation of Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta’s celebrated manifesto The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (1977). The co-creators of the performance, Hadrien Daigneault-Roy and Sascha Cowan, explore this fairy tale as a vehicle for transmitting underground and community-based knowledge. Stories passed on in secret. Stories that are performed and re-enacted. Stories that move through our bodies, from generation to generation. In this solo-performance, drag artist Hassandra explores the ramifications of cyborg faggotries in the era of artificial intelligence.Using a vocal mask technology developed by experimental composer Luke Nickel, the performer treats voice modification like makeup. Sensors link each facial expression to a sound, a tone, a voice. Pushing the boundaries of drag, this vocal mask enables a real-time cascade of identities—layering, colliding, and dissolving into one another. Queens, fairies, and faggots make their voices resonate like an earworm, intertwining and contradicting each other, to reveal the hidden community of Pansy Path. This magical street exists beyond time and trends, somewhere between the vibrant New York of the Stonewall riots and the dark depths of Berlin’s darkrooms. This street, both real and fictional, is the meeting point of all liberated spaces—a place where the laws of men no longer apply, and where small colorful utopias emerge in the heart of greyness. Interdisciplinary and radical, FAGGOT*S explores the potential of a queer body that fully embraces synthetic, artificial, and technological means to appear and disappear at will. Everything is fake. Everything is real.

GRWM dives into the tension between exposure and concealment, turning shame into a site of drag-inspired transformation. Drawing on the vulnerability of the „Get Ready With Me“ Tiktok trend, the performance dissolves the boundaries between self and other, inviting us to confront our discomfort with unfiltered authenticity. Shame becomes a mirror, reflecting our own fragility while preserving the other’s difference. By embracing the raw, awkward, and transgressive, the work resists pity, transforming the audience’s gaze into one of intimate recognition and shared vulnerability.

“House of Cardamom” is a work-in-progress interactive project performance that revolves around the cultural significance of coffee rituals, particularly coffee-reading ceremonies in the Arabic-speaking world. Through the residency, we will research and contemplate on the therapeutic and communal space provided by morning coffee gatherings. The project becomes a documentation of our Arab queer experiences in exile, offering a space for celebration, mourning, and rest—a reflection of the essence of coffee reading itself. Through rituals, movements, text, and the art of lip-syncing, Arab drag artists Bolbola and Hassandra use their shared experiences and collective memory as the foundation for this intimate exploration of identity, community, and tradition.

This autobiographical performance explores the artist's experience of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, which began on July 12th and lasted thirty-four days, killing over a thousand Lebanese people and displacing many thousands more. At twelve years old, the artist witnessed their mother's attempts to remain calm amid the terror of rockets and drones, experienced the panic when leaflets warned of bombings in their neighborhood on day twenty-nine, and felt profound abandonment as relatives fled while their jobless father and family, with no savings or safe haven, remained behind. Though the ceasefire came five days later, those days felt like years, aging the artist irrevocably and leaving them in a perpetual state of survival rather than truly living. ‎تَمّوز (tammūz) is an autobiographical performance that invokes this embodied experience of survival, staging a physical exploration of memory as an act of queer and decolonial archiving to salvage the lived experiences of non-white queer youth from erasure while grappling with the lingering ghosts of trauma and the question of how many times one must tell a story to heal from it. This original solo piece has been developed over three stages and was previously titled "Are We Dead Yet?"This autobiographical performance explores the artist's experience of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, which began on July 12th and lasted thirty-four days, killing over a thousand Lebanese people and displacing many thousands more. At twelve years old, the artist witnessed their mother's attempts to remain calm amid the terror of rockets and drones, experienced the panic when leaflets warned of bombings in their neighborhood on day twenty-nine, and felt profound abandonment as relatives fled while their jobless father and family, with no savings or safe haven, remained behind. Though the ceasefire came five days later, those days felt like years, aging the artist irrevocably and leaving them in a perpetual state of survival rather than truly living. ‎تَمّوز (tammūz) is an autobiographical performance that invokes this embodied experience of survival, staging a physical exploration of memory as an act of queer and decolonial archiving to salvage the lived experiences of non-white queer youth from erasure while grappling with the lingering ghosts of trauma and the question of how many times one must tell a story to heal from it. This original solo piece has been developed over three stages and was previously titled "Are We Dead Yet?"

Get ready to leave earthly affairs behind and start a new journey into space. The world is cancelled and we are offering you a safer space in space. If it sounds scary, no need to worry. You will be accompanied by experts facilitating your integration into the unknown system — a cryptic system that requires mysterious missions to unlock as we traverse hitherto unexplored language and motion. Our target is the ultimate utopia called »Planet Lubunya«. Hurry up and take your seats in the spaceship. This is an emergency take off.   »Planet Lubunya« was initiated by İrem Aydın (Berlin) and Efe Durmaz (İstanbul) in 2020 as a format for digital solidarity between queer people in Turkey and Germany. It now takes off as a theater production with (mainly) Berlin based artists and is heading towards interstellar collaborations with artists from a multitude of places.

​​After sold-out shows in 2021 in SchwuZ and a successful guest performance at Kleist Forum Frankfurt/O., multimedia queer cabaret LILA LIED is returning to Berlin in December! "We are just different from the others who only love in step with morality." So begins the chanson Lila Lied, written by Jewish composer Mischa Spoliansky with Kurt Schwabach in 1920. It became the anthem of the new homosexual movement and celebrates the dream of an open society. Over a hundred years later, the Lila Lied needs to be heard again! This chanson is the starting point for the cabaret show of the same name. With electronic music, drag, burlesque and spoken word, the biographies of queer-feminist artists of the Weimar Republic are revived and bridges to current emancipatory movements are built. Far from a straightforward piece of Weimar nostalgia, the post-migrant team around the singer and director Ludwig Obst approaches these personalities by looking for autobiographical interfaces. In this way, the cabaret group formulates a queer-migrant view of our society today: and the position of all those who are "different from the others" in the most diverse ways.

A glance leads to a smile, a smile to a rendezvous: every love story begins the same way. These narratives are stored in songs and poems and live on beyond their inevitable endings, as Shakespeare’s titular sonnet 18 also suggests. In Mohammad Shawky Hassan’s metafictional essay, a female narrator who wishes to tell the story of a love between two men encounters a polyamorous chorus of lovers, and this oft-told tale is multiplied. In Club Scheherazade, there is no protagonist, and every song has various versions. Heteronormative dramaturgy is challenged polyphonically and across a range of media: lovers ask each other about threesomes, Grindr contacts and past dates. Pop clichés are twisted, heartache permeates the men’s singing, and poems by Wadih Saadeh are read out while a lover’s dirty laundry is aired. The narrator mischievously tries for a happy ending as her characters exit the story. “If pain could be forgotten through words,” we hear at one point, “no lover would ever have to walk away wounded.”

Beirut-born artist Hassan Dib meditates on desired and undesired movements through diverging worlds. Who are the ghosts haunting us as we move between place and displacement? Caught between past and present, Dib explores the meaning and the price of survival. Drawing inspiration from Sylvia Plath’s seminal poem Lady Lazarus, Dib collaborates with director Kelly McKay and DoP Joey Bania, to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of liminal existence. The camera assumes the role of an intruding observant, torturing Dib as they hang between life and death.

On the mask of the play by Hüseyin Alp Tahmaz, five protagonists ask themselves the question what contemporary theater on German stages should look like on the subject of flight and migration. On the one hand, there is the story of five people from different countries who, fleeing war or hunger, have made their way to Europe and are now all sitting on the back of a truck. At the same time, we look at actors sitting on a theater stage: they discuss, read, improvise and try to eat their way into the text. How do you break through the discrepancy between reverence and privilege?

Warning or battle cry? Visniec's collage of scenes incorporates press reports about the current refugee movements. Six actors with migration experience bring this bitterly satirical piece to the stage. In numerous snapshots, they paint a picture that makes one's own privilege stick in one's throat. From a variety of surprising perspectives, profiteers of the crisis are shown, behind whom human tragedies always lie.