In Celebration

Looking down from the terrace of Studio 1 at Radialsystem, the Spree catches the warm afternoon light of early autumn. In the courtyard, someone is reading alone, some are resting in chairs facing the Spree, others are standing together having a pleasant chat.

The red brick building at Holzmarktstraße 33 once housed the capital city's water infrastructure, an Abwasserpumpenwerk. Twenty years ago, it opened as Radialsystem and has since become an institutional anchor of Berlin's independent arts scene. From 9 to 12 September, the venue invites everyone back in with the anniversary weekend „Radialsystem für Alle".
 

The cosmic body

Friday afternoon. As part of „Unexpected Lessons 4: Decolonizing the Body in Dance", Dr. Rajyashree Ramesh combines different movement methods to guide participants toward the movement state of Bharatanatyam, the classical Indian dance form. Among all the bodies, what is distinctive? What is universal? With so many methodologies, practices, and theoretical lenses available for constructing the very concept of a body, each person arrives with a radically different understanding of their own. When we gather as a group, is it still possible to reach the same place? Her answer is „Yes".

Starting with free walking through the space and yoga exercises with chakra mapping on the floor, participants slowly clear the movement habits accumulated in daily life. It is a deliberate forgetting before anything new can arrive. In the second phase, Dr. Rajyashree Ramesh introduces simplified movement vocabulary such as lotus gestures, basic spatial orientations using the Laban body framework. Like learning a shared architectural language, we start to explore what combinations of movement feel most natural to ourselves.

What is genuinely surprising is the third phase. We are asked to hold a furious gaze, and then a compassionate one. Without framing them explicitly as Buddhist iconography, we experience them as a precise performing instrument. When the inner state shifts, the whole body follows: the chest, the breath, the quality of weight in the arms.

Dr. Rajyashree Ramesh is not a dance instructor in the sense of transmitting a sequence to be repeated. She does not teach the way movement is sometimes taught in East Asian conservatory traditions, where a set of dance program is passed down in a classroom. Instead, she guides participants through a sustained process of noticing. What do our bodies already feel? What can we do differently? What does it feel like from the inside when something changes? To arrive at something resembling an aesthetic understanding of Bharatanatyam is considerably rarer and harder. It is an education process of building appreciation of what the form is doing and why.
 

In C

Saturday evening, in the Halle, the production „In C" by Sasha Waltz & Guests returns to Radialsystem with special collaborators. The audience sits on cushions with no backrests and the score is performed live by Acid Pauli, Rodney Barreto, Regis Molina, Daniel Allen Oberto, and Karl Ivar Refseth.

Probably the most abstract work from Sasha Waltz, „In C" has developed into a democratic practice across ages and countries in recent years. In the piece, leadership is shifting rather than assigned, personal freedom is calibrated against the group constantly. Tonight, the theme is celebration. Not so common in an „In C" performance: at several points, dancers move out of the performing space, form a statue beside the musicians, interact with the front-row audience, and travel through the middle of the audience space with visible joy. This celebratory version lasts around 65 minutes. By the ending, time has become genuinely hard to measure. In the corridor afterwards, a man says it has been „viel emotionaler" than the last time he experienced it.
 

In questions we trust

It is a weekend for reunion and new encounters. Dance institution professionals, artistic practitioners, and academic experts meet across concerts, exhibitions, reading spaces, and a club party for all. Sharp questions, honest insights, and discussions that resist quick resolution are perhaps exactly the best description of the venue itself: a place that allows contradictions to coexist, affect one another, and create friction.

As a regular visitor, I have spent many evenings here with works that refused easy answers. In question we trust, let's toast to the next twenty years of the same!