Every January, Sophiensæle’s Tanztage festival puts the spotlight on burgeoning talent from within contemporary dance. This year’s program has plenty of cross-pollination and queer gestures. Joey Hansom provides a rundown of highlights

Jan. 3, 2017 – Neues Jahr, neue Tanztage. Now in its 26th edition, the annual festival continues to showcase up-and-coming dancers and choreographers from around the world, amongst them, of course, many agile Berlin figures. The numerous productions this year include eight premieres, plus several interactive talks, as well as parties that bookend the eleven-day affair at the Sophiensæle theater in Mitte.

Tarren Johnson, last seen in the Deutsche Oper's Gianni, and Mira O'Brien, an installation artist who works primarily with glass, are throwing Shade (Jan. 5-6), making use of algorithms to prompt actions. “I've always been inspired by human miscalculations or, in other words, intuition,“ Johnson explains to SIEGESSÄULE. “I’m equally interested in computer malfunctions. This piece takes the communication blunders seen in chat bots and other AI devices meant to mimic human behavior and turns them into a sound-movement composition.“ She performs along with dancer John Snyder and, curiously, Winston Chmielinski, who's known in the art world as a painter and assistant to Ai Wei Wei. This one could be a collective Gesamtkunstwerk – or at least a hot mess reflecting our precarious post-Fordist 2017.

If that doesn't fulfill your interdisciplinary desires, there's also Documentary Dance (Jan. 7-8). Docu-theater has been trending lately, and with that in mind, four dancers will each present a 15-minute solo piece that uses real events as source material. Hips don't lie!

Sorour Darabi (pictured) is one of five guests for Around the World (Jan. 6-7), Tanztage's cultural exchange with scenes outside of Europe: this year, they are presenting five highlights from the Untimely Festival, founded in 2010 in Tehran by the Invisible Center of Contemporary Dance (presumably invisible to go unnoticed by authorities in Iran, where dancing can be subject to strict legal codes). As you've certainly realized, anything can be categorized as dance nowadays. That includes eating soggy inkjet paper. Darabi conceived Farci.e (Jan. 7) while studying in Montpelier. In her native Persian language, there's only one third-person pronoun – no “he” or “she” – but in French, everyone and everything is gendered. Le vagin is masculine? Qu'est-ce que c’est? Let's dance about gender, baby. A chat with the audience will follow.

Is it getting pussy in here, or is it just me? Vulva Club (Jan. 13) is a queer-feminist platform that emphasizes the “cont” in contemporary dance. Founded by the female trouble collective in 2013, the Club celebrates their 15th staging for Tanztage, incorporating three dancers, political discussion and food into the mix.

Tanztage is all about fresh blood, and choreographer Cécille Bally provides just that: vampire buffs will definitely want to check out The Sleep of Reason (Jan 14-15), premiering at the festival. The vampire casts a long shadow, surviving through generations of folklore, literature and pop culture into the present day. “It's one of these few fantastical figures that has really evolved through the last 30 years and addresses contemporary social issues. It became a model representing some kind of subculture,” Bally tells SIEGESSÄULE. Sleep is about a vampire who lives in a world that no longer believes in magic or the things she is supposed to fear, like crosses and holy water, “and so the vampire is trying to fit into this world by becoming rational,“ she says. “Vampires also have an interesting relationship to the concept of reproduction, a queer one.” She explains: “You are reproducing with your partner, who becomes your child: you bite someone, and then they turn into a vampire, too. Gender doesn't matter. As a vampire, you can reproduce with basically anyone. It puts sexuality on another level.”

Joey Hansom

Tanztage 2017, Jan. 5-15, Sophiensæle