A program that makes the diversity of contemporary stage art visible and renegotiates the question of identity in a big, quiet and unexpected way.
Berliner Festspiele's Performing Arts Season 2025/26 brings together international voices from dance, theater and performance from 16 October 2025 to 25 January 2026. The season understands identity not as a fixed label, but as a changeable network of experiences, perspectives and bodies - and invites the audience to think along with these movements. The Haus der Berliner Festspiele and the Gropius Bau are the two central venues that create different atmospheres and give the productions plenty of space.
The focus is on works by artists and ensembles from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Some are about migration and belonging, others about memory, language or the question of how bodies carry stories. Some evenings work with great choreographic power, others are reduced, almost intimate encounters. It is precisely this range that characterizes the season: It shows how differently art negotiates identity today - fragmentary, contradictory, playful, political.
The season does not see itself as a classical festival, but as a continuous series that allows themes to flow into one another. Connections, transitions and tensions arise between the productions. Talks, installations and accompanying formats broaden the perspectives without overloading the individual works.
Visitors to the Performing Arts Season will therefore not only experience individual productions, but a curated movement through forms and attitudes. A panorama of contemporary stage art that shows how open and lively the performing arts scene currently is - and how current issues can be given new weight in the space of a theater.
October 16, 2025 to January 25, 2026
