When South Korean choreographer Eun-Me Ahn’s Post-Orientalist Express rolls in, you let yourself be swept along — and be prepared to leave your baggage behind. In her latest work, which will celebrate its European premiere on 15.11.2025 at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele as part of the Performing Arts Season 2025/26, Eun-Me Ahn explores the legacy of Orientalism. She deconstructs the stories that the “enlightened West” tells about the “mysterious Orient” and asks: Who is speaking about whom — and how? Together with her ensemble, she searches for hybrid choreographic identities that move beyond internalized stereotypes. On a stage that merges traditional cultural forms with neo-traditional remix elements, Ahn demonstrates that “tradition” and “modernity” are no longer separate categories but exist in continuous dialogue, often through contradictory images. These tensions are visible in the 90 costumes, all designed by Ahn herself. Her questions remain pressing: How do orientalist perspectives continue to shape the work of Asian artists today? What role does the memory of colonial regimes of the gaze still play? And how can encounters between East and West be reimagined? The Post-Orientalist Express doesn’t simply travel from A to B, it traverses spaces, ideas, and attributions, inviting audiences to climb aboard and dive in deeply.
Continuing this exploration of deconstructing clichés and inherited images, Gisèle Vienne and Étienne Bideau-Rey’s Showroomdummies #4 premieres on 05.12.2025. Here, dolls meet performers, and the boundaries between body and object become disturbingly interchangeable. Vienne and Bideau-Rey work with the tension between attraction and repulsion, drawing on references that range from masochism to Japanese horror. The result is a piece that lays bare desire, the staging of femininity, and the mechanics of the gaze. The dolls are not mere props; they form an integral part of a dramaturgy of withdrawal and suggestion. While Ahn interrogates questions of identity and attribution, Vienne and Bideau-Rey examine attribution itself as a physical and theatrical pattern. Together, both productions transform the stage into a laboratory of perception, standing as emblematic examples of the radical, playful, and critical international dance, theater, and performance works that the Performing Arts Season will bring to the Haus der Berliner Festspiele through early 2026.
Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: Credit: Jean-Marie Chabot, Hervé Véronèse, Sukmu Yun & Jiyang Kim
Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Schaperstr. 24, 10719 Berlin-Wilmersdorf; map
Performing Arts Season 2025/26 until 25.01.2026. Info and tickets can be found here.
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