AG Elternschaft: On Moving Future – a cross-generational playground
Michela Filzi / Feb. 2026
On the last weekend of November this year, I attended Moving Future – a dance event with and for families and artists from the Berlin dance scene. The event took place at Uferstudios, hosted by Tanzfabrik Berlin BÜHNE and organized by AG Elternschaft, a group founded in 2020 within Zeitgenössischer Tanz Berlin e.V. (ZTB), that advocates for better working conditions for parents working in dance, as well as for the cultural participation of caregivers.
The following text recounts my personal experience of the event and reflects on the relevance of play in culture-making. As I witnessed the event unfold through a series of game-inspired workshops and sharings, I was reminded of Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga’s seminal 1955 work Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. In this book, Huizinga argues that play is central to civilization and that indeed it precedes and forms the very basis of human culture.
During the event, the AG Elternschaft team posed a series of questions. A large sheet of paper hung on the wall, with markers available for participants to respond. I take this article as an opportunity to address those questions that, for me, were already answered by the event itself.
“What if theaters asked themselves: how can a child spend time here? How would the space change?”
Studio 4 at Tanzfabrik is filled with playful objects: construction materials, soft dice-shaped pillows, large textiles, long sheets of paper, pencils, and markers for drawing. As children enter the space, they immediately understand what it has been prepared for: PLAY!
I myself feel a sense of relief as I find a spot where I can lie on the floor and stretch my body out of winter torpor. It is the end of the year, and the urgency of finishing things cramps my muscles. From this small corner, I observe children of different ages rushing in and diving headfirst into play: running, chasing, hiding, escaping, falling, jumping over and onto objects; grabbing, placing, and combining materials to create imaginary shapes and surreal forms.
What does it mean to experience the world from a childlike state? It evokes in me a familiar sense of innocence and wonder. I hear giggling and laughter, instructions being exchanged, but also reflections and sudden revelations. It feels as though children inhabit the space somatically, their bodies guiding them through the room, exploring imagination in a deeply corporeal manner.
They live the reality of imagination and bring their caregivers along with them. A blue textile sheet becomes a river, dotted with soft stones made of pillows; they jump from one stone to the next, careful not to fall into the water. The world transforms into a fantasy landscape, shaped by the imaginative power of children.
The studio becomes a playground and inside this playground, a peculiar order reigns, created by the play itself. Play demands its own order or rather it transmutes into order itself. In a complex world play introduces a temporary, limited perfection, abstracted from the confusion of life. If theaters were to ask themselves how a child might spend time within their spaces, those spaces might gradually transform into something akin to a playground – not a spectacular one, but an environment that simply allows children to enter into play, held within a framework of safety and imagined for intergenerational accessibility.
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“Imagine if the presence of children in a theater were not considered an exception, but rather an impulse for new types of togetherness, new temporalities, and new physicalities.”
Gradually, we all move to Studio 2, where a series of workshops are offered by different mediators and members of AG Elternschaft. The transition takes time. It is difficult to interrupt the world of games that has unfolded and to shift attention while being so fully absorbed in that parallel reality. Yet patience permeates the atmosphere, and time becomes a point of reference rather than a source of pressure. Being present and being on time are not necessarily the same thing.
Social norms are sedimented around ideas of punctuality and efficiency, yet this is clearly not the natural state of the human nervous system.
As I find a new observation point among seated mothers with crawling babies, chatting quietly among themselves, I feel a sense of calm and rest, a pause marked by care and nurturance. Meanwhile, the energy in the larger space is stirred by two teenagers holding hands and spinning around their held axis, laughing and screaming. Another young child relentlessly practices cartwheels and handstands, weaving between participants and using the wall for support in their acrobatic dance. A parent spins their child by the arms. The space is activated through rotation, through the inversion of perception and a shared delight of altered orientation.
Music plays, and it seems everyone has shifted into full bodily engagement. Movement becomes contagious, emerging in bursts of energy that allow bodies to find their own forms of self-regulation. Across the room, I notice a parent sitting among a group of children, rehearsing a choreography with her arms, absorbed in her sequence, yet fully available to the children around her.
Different energies coexist within the space, forming small pockets of activation: from the exuberant dances of pre-teens to the quiet nursing of babies. There is something almost ancestral about this configuration, recalling a time when people gathered to share spaces of existence and perception.
“What if care were not seen as a private challenge, but rather as a social responsibility – one that people engage with creatively?”
As one workshop begins, participants gather in a circle to follow a proposal involving an imaginary ball, passed from hand to hand. It becomes big and light, then small and heavy, then hot and burning, or flaccid and smelly. The attention of adults and children alike is drawn to this magical, invisible object, which transforms with each new pair of hands catching it midair.
Caregivers hold small children in their arms while others stand beside them. Each is responsible for their own, and yet all are collectively responsible for the shared engagement of the game and all the children roaming around. Even when an uninterested child drifts off to practice cartwheels or pursue an individual game, attention remains central and peripheral at once.
I notice my own sense of protection being activated as a child falls or as I anticipate a possible collision between two bodies. This feels significant: we are all implicated in care and conscious coexistence within a shared space. How much of our social structure would need to be dismantled in order to truly live by the idea that care for children in public spaces – such as a theater – is a collective responsibility?
Within myself, the instinctive reaction is already there: I want to jump up when a child falls or cries. Yet my rational mind hesitates, questioning whether such an intervention is appropriate. Our responses to the social environment are learned, shaped by education and convention. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost hold of the idea that it takes a village to raise a child.
“What might happen if teams accepted that working with children slows processes down and understood this slowness as an opening rather than a limitation?“
If, as Huizinga suggests, play is not a secondary activity but a foundational force of culture, then slowness is not a failure of productivity but a condition of meaning. To assume that work becomes slower in the presence of children is to acknowledge a shift in tempo that play itself demands: an expanded sense of time in which attention, care, and imagination can circulate differently. What opens in this deceleration is a threshold toward new forms of coexistence, new rhythms of togetherness, and new cultural practices that resist efficiency as a dominant value. In this sense, working with children does not diminish artistic or organizational processes; it reorients them toward a culture that understands play not as interruption, but as a generative mode of being together.