#3 RETHINKING DANCE IN ACADEMIA
Beyond Academia? How Dance Rewrites Research
Performative Talk with Prof. Dr. Mariama Diagne and Prof. Dr. Sandra Noeth
with interventions by Isabel Kwarteng-Acheampong
September 11, 2026, 6–7:30 pm | German
SAAL, Radialsystem, Berlin
In this conversation, Sandra Noeth (HZT) and Mariama Diagne (LMU), both professors in the field of dance and performance research at German universities, explore how dance as a practice, an art form, and a discursive field has impacted an academic field of research over time. Drawing on their professional trajectories, they reflect on what it means to study dance in institutional settings — universities, art academies, theatres, or museums — whose foundations lie in imperial and centralist knowledge structures: Which concepts, expectations, and scholarly forms shape access to the field? Building on this, they ask how the landscape is shifting today: at a moment when embodied practices, non‑academically formed perspectives and collective forms of learning and artistic methods are gaining importance and bringing new forms of knowledge into view. At the centre lies a fundamental question that reaches far beyond the discipline itself: How do we not only research dance, but how does dance transform what we call “research”?
Entry free!
LA PALABRE Space — Tea, Reading & Resting Room
September 11, 2–9 pm
KUBUS, Radialsystem, Berlin
Tea, Reading & Resting Room with artistic interventions. The programme at LA PALABRE Space is curated by Arantxa Ciafrino. On September 11th, LA PALABRE Space will feature jee chan and Cheng-jung Tsai. More information on the LA PALABRE Space can be found here.
#4 DECOLONIZING THE BODY IN DANCE
Cuerpos de Tierra — Earth Bodies
Workshop with Martha Hincapié Charry
September 11, 2026, 1-3 pm | German/English
STUDIO, Radialsystem, Berlin
With an ecofeminist approach, “EARTH BODIES” reimagines (environ-)mental care through a decolonial perspective on climate anxiety by fostering biodiverse relationships and a regenerative state. Martha Hincapié Charry's workshop asks: How are our bodies and all our relationships affected by environmental grief?
Martha opens her ritualistic process, delving into the relationship of our bodies with nature and the current climate chaos or biodiversity extinction crisis. We’ll explore our eco-somatic interdependence with Earth, unfolding, with a non-anthropocentric perspective, an intersectional reflection together with more-than-human bodies, linking the visible and the invisible worlds. Participants are invited to embody one’s understanding of nature, reflected in the mirror of the current crisis in our relationship with our own nature. The practice/workshop opens channels of sensorial, and embodied encounters, creating a reflection space about the urgency of rewilding our wounded bodies/ home/planet. Human and more-than-human ancestral knowledge is invoked in a ceremonial space where participants are invited experience an intimate, immersive space. Participants are asked to bring with them an element of nature: a stone, branch or a feather for example.
Entry free, Registration here.
The Cosmic Body
Workshop with Dr. Rajyashree Ramesh
September 11, 2026, 3:30-5:30 pm | German/English
STUDIO, Radialsystem, Berlin
The Cosmic Body workshop is designed as a deep-core exploration through the varied layers of movement mechanisms and qualities that relate to corpo-cosmological knowledge evident in the ancient Indian worldview. In her practice-based methodology Rajyashree Ramesh explores the idea of an embodied knowing discernible in the references to the human body in the understanding of the cosmos – the constitutive elements (space, wind, fire, water and earth) and forces of nature as energy and rhythm in relation to enclosed space. She specifically positions the dancing body as a dynamic container and moving intervention in this bodily knowing. In the workshop she guides through her exploratory integration of body and movement knowledge from Indian performative practices, and current movement and fascia studies. The workshop experientially layers elemental qualities at inner energy centres, physiologically perceptible neuro-muscular and fascial structures and the outer structured shaping and felt expressivity of performative practices such as Bharatanatyam to arrive at inherent form-space-dynamics – a corpo-cosmological mechanism so to say that Rajyashree Ramesh identifies as ground for bodily knowing.
Entry free, Registration here.
The Cosmic Body
Lecture-Performance with Dr. Rajyashree Ramesh
September 12, 2026, 4-6 pm | English
SAAL, Radialsystem, Berlin
Amazonia 2040
Lecture-Performance with Martha Hincapié Charry
September 12, 2026, 4-6 pm | English
SAAL, Radialsystem, Berlin
Entry free!
On Unarriving
Performance by Sage Ni‘Ja Whitson
September 12, 2026, 6:30–7:15 pm | English
STUDIO, Radialsystem, Berlin
Entry free!
What do we mean when we talk about bodies? Contemporary artistic approaches challenge the notion of a “neutral” body in Western dance, revealing it as historically and culturally constructed. In Indigenous and non-Western knowledge systems, the body emerges not as a malleable object, but as a carrier of memory, relation, and meaning. The artistic practices of Dr. Rajyashree Ramesh, Martha Hincapié Charry, and Sage Ni’Ja Whitson present the body as a site where history, emotion, knowledge, and environment intersect: In The Cosmic Body, Ramesh conceives of the body as part of cosmic orders; in Amazonia 2040, Hincapié Charry views it as an ecofeminist territory in which (de)colonial and ecological issues are inscribed; and in their performance On Unarriving Whitson, who lives in Berlin as a fellow of DAAD Artists-in-Berlin, approaches dark matter and dark energy as sacred and cosmic technology. Movement becomes a practice of reconnection — with territory, cosmology, and community — and at the same time an act of resilience and resistance.
LA PALABRE Space — Tea, Reading & Resting Room
September 12, 2–9 p.m.
KUBUS, Radialsystem, Berlin
Tea, Reading & Resting Room with artistic interventions. The programme at LA PALABRE Space is curated by Arantxa Ciafrino. On September 12th, LA PALABRE Space will feature the dancing project Coole Kinder. More information on the LA PALABRE Space can be found here.
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.