“Everything I make starts with language, with a word, a title, a repeated phrase” – Melanie Jame Wolf

Language is sound. Tunes dancing in a choreography; your tongue moving against your palate and pushing against your teeth. We spit and chew, bite and devour, click our tongues and sing and scream. Writing is a practice of knowledge transmission, memory, and self-positioning. In the intertwining of body, orality, and writing, hybrid forms emerge in which experience, history, and the present are inscribed and carried forward. 

Writing and Orality

“Language Acts” – Writing Workshop with Celina Baljeet Basra & Melanie Jame Wolf
October 31, 2026, 3-6 pm | English
KUBUS, Radialsystem, Berlin 

How to edit language acts for the stage? How to shape text for dance and performance? Language Acts is a writing workshop co-hosted by Melanie Jame Wolf and Celina Baljeet Basra for dance and performance practitioners, as well as writers who would like to think about language as a carefully considered material for performance, both in making and presentation. It is for artists who would like to develop concrete tools for editing and rewriting language that will live on stages. Celina Baljeet Basra and Melanie Jame Wolf invite participants to bring an existing text that we will workshop and evolve in two rounds. The objective of the workshop is to equip stage artists with agency in writing.

Tickets here via Radialsystem.

“The Resonating Body” – Three Performances

Reading, Performance and Screenings with Alvin Tran, emet ezell and Melanie Jame Wolf
October 31, 2026, 7 pm | English
STUDIO 1, Radialsystem, Berlin 

Choreographer, performer, writer, and visual artist Melanie Jame Wolf explores the vulnerability of the live moment and the body as an unruly political riddle; she will present the formal experiment “UNRULY MATERIAL (After Genet, after Mr. Punch)”. Visual artist and writer emet ezell works with the themes of devotion, dispossession, ruin, and return. The mouth and lips, and knowledge transmitted through eating, chewing, and spitting, are recurring motifs in their work. At Radialsystem, they will present the performative reading “MY MOUTH IS A RESURRECTION CHANNEL”. Choreographer and artist Alvin Tran works with pop songs, music videos, and film. “STRAWBERRY, ARIZONA”, the artist’s first play, is about spectatorship and the parasocial imagination. It explores the frightening possibility that personality itself can become a survival technology: something we inherit, perform, desire, and eventually pass on to someone else.

Tickets here via Radialsystem.

Artist Talk

Talk with Alvin Tran, emet ezell and Melanie Jame Wolf, moderated by Celina Baljeet Basra
October 31, 2026, 8.30 pm | English
STUDIO 1, Radialsystem, Berlin 

The series UNEXPECTED LESSONS — Knowledges of Body and Sound is funded by the LOTTO Foundation Berlin. In cooperation with the Betty Center for Movement Research in Dance Studies at LMU Munich.