Chōri Collective, Dianna Jacksan Mansamussa, Navild Acosta, Elliott Cennetoglu, Jere Ikongio: Moving against, with and towards - an evening of choreographing the social

Paying homage in the cold, a choreographic exquisite corpse, a blessing of feathers falling down upon the head and the bark of a downward facing dog. These were just a few of the touching images I met while witnessing the works-in-progress by four of the five artists in residence at Tanzfabrik’s 2025 R.E.D Residency program.
 
This year, inspired by Andrew Hewitt’s concept of “social choreography”, the curatorial team at Tanzfabrik worked with artists focused on topics of community and social spaces. Despite the artists’ different biographies, backgrounds and practices, it felt clear to me that each are meaningfully working with and through the understanding that ideology shapes the body – both the social and individual body. And in their different ways, I sensed the artists might also be proposing that perhaps the body can, in turn, shape ideology.
 
The first artist to present their research was Jere Ikongio who, in a duet alongside Klara Oversun, began by leading the audience around the Hof of Uferstudios, in a rhythmic, solemn procession. Before bringing us inside Studio 2, Jere announced in a simple yet resonant voice the paying of homage to earth, to air and to us, the people present. This word “homage” stayed with me throughout the rest of the performance.
When I returned home later I looked up the etymology. Homage: a noun from the 13th Century denoting a ceremony or acknowledgement of faithfulness to one’s lord, sharing roots with the French “homme” and the Latin “homo” – for man, as well as sharing roots with “human”, which partly comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *dhghem meaning “earth”. This etymological digression seemed to resonate with some of Ikongio’s subterranean questions – what “lords” are we, as humans, faithful to? And what of the earth, out of which our humanity comes?

Once we arrived inside, the two performers began washing the floor in a slow, deliberate sequence, preparing the space to the live ambient music of Nicolaas Heemskerk. The performance unfolded as a series of fluid vignettes accompanied by projected films of urban spaces, the performers dancing in studio and later in a river surrounded by forest, as well as a peculiar and effective projection of a delayed live-stream of the stage from a phone, which interestingly had the effect of warping both time and space. Ikongio’s recitation of a poem and later the projected live-streamed recordings of newspaper headlines urgently declaring our climate catastrophe, situated the work concretely back to the human, humanity – the earth. As the performance closed once more with water, this time the dancers washing each other, I understood that Ikongio’s perception of ‘community’ goes far beyond the urban and the human, to embrace our planet as a ceremony that must be tended to.
 
Moving to Studio 4 to meet the work of Navild Acosta, the tone of the evening shifted into a welcoming presentation as Navild warmly greeted the arriving audience, introducing some of practices he’s been developing alongside his collaborators, Rositsa Mahdi and Zehnergy. He opened with a karaoke song, singing his own re-written version of Supertramp’s song ‘Goodbye Stranger’. In his version however, Acosta bids farewell to gender, states, race – a generous adieu to the multilayered racist structures of coloniality/modernity that, as a Black, trans and disabled artist and activist, Acosta is forced to navigate. Nestled in this upbeat song, I perceived something of a cornerstone in both Acosta’s artistic practice and navigational strategies: a reclamation of narrative and identities with disciplined and rigorous joy, made possible only through relationality and community. It became clear in the after-talk that, for Acosta, being in community is not just a way of making art but a way of surviving the world.

After the karaoke song, he managed to get the entire audience out of their seats and dancing together, leading us through what he called a ‘choreographic exquisite corpse’ where we imitated the gradual building of dance moves initiated by himself and added onto by his collaborators. In this game-like practice, I was reminded of Donna Haraway’s methodology of ‘working by addition’. There’s a kind of political resonance in the proposal that by witnessing, remembering and building onto the gestures of each other, one is more able to step into critical participation (and transformation?) of structures that shape the body. Perhaps this participation opens up tiny cracks of resistance that also gradually build upon each other. In the closing sequence, Acosta, Mahdi and Zehnergy performed a kind of ‘day-in-the-life-of-‘ dance, taking us through ordinary gestures from scrolling to walking down the street. Again I saw how social connection makes the labour of critical participation possible as the three dancers walk, work, talk and twerk themselves through their intersectional realities and struggles.
 
Following this open hearted sharing, back to Studio 2, Dianna Jacksan Manzamussa is awaiting us on stage. Regally dressed in a large white dress and playing the berimbau (a musical bow played in Brazil, where Manzamussa is from) she did not resemble a bride – her figure infinitely more dynamic than this. Poised and ready to strike, she reminded me rather of the Queen of Wands tarot archetype and as the performance progressed, I understood I was witnessing a type of spell being cast. After ceremoniously completing her minimal song, she walked amongst the audience, holy, and sprinkling white feathers generously on us all.

Incense burned, the space prepared. Something between a mourning ritual and a celebration dance, Manzamussa skillfully incorporated aesthetics and techniques from ballroom, urban dance and capoeira into a movement vocabulary that felt entirely fresh and casually ancient. Supported by the sounds by Jota Kayodê Ramos, every gesture, eye-line, angle of the wrist seemed to have been crafted both within a context and to create a context. At one moment, with the large white dress removed to reveal a small shiny red outfit, her silhouette behind a screen seemed to stand in for a vast chorus of obscured but self-making bodies. Each choreographed movement was placed and shaped with so much care and intention, like a sacred object on the altar of the stage. This elbow from ballroom, this floor-work from urban dance, this wide step from capoeira – but together, they make a new pathway forged by an insistence of being seen on one’s own terms.
 
Manzamussa’s incorporation of Afrobrazilian Candomblé practices and the Orixás into her work also made something about the performance feel like a knot tied into time, where the work occupied not only the present but also the past and the future, functioning as a kind of statement of protection or prayer – a blessing for all Black trans-femmes far into the future. After the performance, a short video was shown, giving more insight into Dianna’s creative process alongside her dramaturge Tonya Manzamussa. Once more, I saw the careful rigour with which Tonya and Dianna have worked at this piece. Manzamussa’s clearly situates her work in the healing and liberating project of Black trans femme lives and nothing about this project is theoretical – it is lived and alive in the body, breathing, looking, working, playing.
 
For the final sharing of evening, we moved back to Studio 4 for the work by Chōri Collective, a platform for Asian artists made up by Yuni Chung, Mon Sisu Satrawaha and Mudassir Sheikh. In their performance ‘Asian Wellness Centre’, the artists made a dry but powerful critique of the western imagination and invention of ‘wellness’ and ‘Asia’, drawing attention to how these terms are politically merged together in some sort of pseudo-calm salad of consumable well-being-ness.

Two dancers dressed in Muji-muted simple suits moved through a series of poses and positions reminiscent of yoga and ubiquitous workout routines, all to the soundtrack of peaceable voices guiding the movements. As the piece progressed, folds of absurdity slipped into both the instruction-giving voices and the movements of the dancers. At one point they let out a small bark in downward facing dog as though to emphasize this absurdity, breaking the earnest agenda of ‘wellness’ with a flash of disobedient interruption.
 
Behind the performers a video and photomontage was displayed, showing historical footage of diverse movement routines from across time and place – everything from collective gymnastics to military workouts to children in uniform duly moving together in strict timing. The film both concretely and abstractly introduced visual connections between bodies, control and political agendas while the performers managed to twist something as commonplace as a yoga class with an underlying tension. Their brief passage through the “Warrior-pose” took an eery shift as we received multiple images of bodies being shaped, toned and collectivized in accordance with the soothing tones of guided movement. This brilliant and simple choreography in relation to the projected images and the voiceover eventually led us to the performers lying down in the final concluding surrender of “Shavasana” and I wondered what the corpse of toxic wellness culture might look like.
 
After the piece we were told that Chōri Collective member Mudassir Sheikh, an integral part of the creative process, was not able to be present at the performance. I would not have guessed the duet had originally been created as a trio, as Satrawaha and Chung held the performance with skill. Their presence on stage was completely unaffected as they humorously yet seriously unpacked topics of history and coloniality in the work, as well as the ways in which whiteness and capitalism continues its consumption of the ‘Other’ in the name of some kind of spiritual completeness or health.
 
In the after talk, each artist shared more about the intricacies and thoughts behind their research during the R.E.D residencies. We were also told that the fifth resident Elliott Cennetoglu, was scheduled to share their research that weekend, not with a performance but through a workshop. In listening not only to the content, but also the tone and energy of the artists and curators, I sensed that for Tanzfabrik this topic of “social choreography” was much more than a theme but something practiced. In the current very tender and tense ideological landscape of Berlin’s independent cultural scene, to work with these particular artists is in itself an intentional gesture of choreographing a social that wants to move against colonial logic and with criticality towards connection, magic and transformation.