On Sunday, January 11 at Sophiensaele, we will host the 6th edition of the Future Workshop series — an ongoing collaboration between the Tanztage Festival and ZTB e.V. that has been running since 2021.
ZTB e.V. Future Workshop and Freelance Dance Ensemble: #6 On Value
What is the value of our work? In a neoliberal economy driven by profit, loss, and return, how can we define and affirm the value of artistic labor – something inherently difficult to quantify? Is the value only to be found in monetary retribution? What has become of the value of art and artistic practice today? Perhaps the question is not only how to redefine the value of the arts, but under which values and conditions we can continue to create and work as dancers, movers, choreographers, and dance workers. In other words, what values do we want to stand for in the Germany of today…
Hologram workshop
Sun, 11.01
13:00 to 16:00
Sophiensaele
By and with: Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova
Co-Facilitators: florence freitag, Holly Sass, Lark Hill
Panel discussion
Sun, 11.01.
17:00
Sophiensaele
Panel guests: Emma Holten, Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova, Jenny Dagg, Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald
Moderation: Zeitgenössischer Tanz Berlin e.V / Julia B. Laperrière, Siegmar Zacharias
Concept: Julia B. Laperrière, Ana Laura Lozza, Siegmar Zacharias
In September 2025, we partnered with Freelance Dance Ensemble Berlin and Tanzbüro Berlin to host a workshop as part of TanzAllianzen. Alice Heyward — dancer, performer, choreographer, and writer — documented the workshop and has written this thoughtful and courageous reflection.
Training for Political Imaginaries: Reclaiming Futures in Dance in Berlin
by Alice Heyward
Gathering in the Wreckage
Amid fatigue, grief, fear, and courage, a small group of artists, cultural workers, and curators gathered on 20–21 September 2025 at DIORAMA—the central working space of Jefta van Dinther and collaborators. Co-hosted by FreelanceDanceEnsembleBerlin (FDEB) together with Zeitgenössischer Tanz Berlin (ZTB) e.V., the weekend formed part of TanzAllianzen, a nationwide network project initiated by Tanzbüro Berlin with ten dance offices and networks across ten federal states. With this weekend, Tanzbüro Berlin formally handed over the Berlin satellite format of TanzAllianzen to key players in the Berlin dance scene. Within this context, the two-day meeting addressed ongoing struggles in the field and their historical and future entanglements.
As Bettina Knaup chillingly warned in a workshop breakout group, the question in Germany today is not if the AfD will come to power, but when—and how we prepare for an even darker political climate. The gathering aimed to reforge resistance: to rupture the individualising logic of freelance careers and bridge struggles between state violence abroad and austerity at home amid the rise of fascism.
It was a discursive and practice-based intervention in the troubled terrain of independent contemporary dance in Berlin. Already a precarious field composed largely of migrant artists, dance in Berlin, and those who work in the field, now face existential threats from substantial government cuts to cultural funding, education, healthcare, and urban planning, amid drastically rising living costs in the city.
Austerity and Complicity
The significant arts cuts were part of a broader austerity package adopted on 19 December 2024, when the Berlin Senate passed the 2025 budget, slashing approximately €130 million from arts and culture.
Germany’s debt crisis and austerity program cannot be blamed solely on COVID expenditure and budget savings. Another force driving these cuts is the exponential increase in military and “defence” spending. Germany, infamously guilty of the Nazi regime’s horrific genocidal crimes of the Holocaust, remains ensnared by its Staatsräson—formalised by Angela Merkel in 2008 as Germany’s historical responsibility for Israel’s security. This position, bolstered by the state’s adoption of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism, effectively conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, institutionalising repression and silencing dissent.
Germany is now the world’s second-largest external supplier of arms to Israel. As we have witnessed—livestreamed daily since Hamas’s deadly attacks and hostage-taking on 7 October 2023—Netanyahu’s government has bombarded Gaza ceaselessly, killing over 70,000 people and displacing its entire population. Germany’s support for Israel persists, even as global condemnation intensifies.
Lawmakers amended the Basic Law to lift the “debt brake” for defence spending, enabling massive rearmament. While the move responds in part to real threats posed by Putin’s war on Ukraine, the German state—bound by its own murderous past—has become complicit in the genocide in Gaza, funnelling millions toward destruction while cutting support for art, care, and education at home.
The connection is clear: Germany is fostering militarism while punishing cultural critique. In Berlin, this has manifested, and continues to, as a suffocating social climate of cultural repression and fear around expressing solidarity with Palestine. The attack on cultural funding cannot be separated from the silencing of dissent.
Disillusionment and Contradiction
By December 2024—over a year into the relentless bombardment of Gaza and Germany’s violent suppression of pro-Palestine protests—I was in despair about how to fight against the cultural cuts. It felt incongruous to march passionately for arts funding when I sensed many loud voices for this cause weren’t also marching for Palestine. Marching against the arts cuts was encouraged, yet marching for Palestinian liberation came with police arresting and harassing the protestors, and the threat of censorship, defunding, deplatforming and even deportation. It is profoundly unjust that those protesting the genocide in Gaza must cover their faces to avoid recognition and the severe repercussions that may follow. Kitty O’Brien is one of many who have recently endured such consequences, sustaining broken bones after being assaulted by Berlin police. How oppressive to be culturally sanctioned to protest against one violence, but not another, when both, one abroad, one at home, stem from the same state apparatus.
Countless artists, activists, and public figures who have spoken out for Palestine have been censored, stigmatised, or deplatformed, losing even more work amid austerity. Projects such as Archive of Silence have emerged to document this repression. Even a wordless painting by Hamishi Farah, depicting former culture minister Joe Chialo, was censored at Transmediale 2025. The painting, simply a portrait of the senator, slyly announced by curator Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung to be the basketballer Michael Jordan, laid bare how racial misrecognition, irony, and censorship intersect in Germany’s cultural politics, exposing the uneasy ties between its professed solidarity with Israel and its ongoing dismantling of public arts funding. Chialo’s ministry pushed for the IHRA definition as a grant requirement following October 7—only to be thankfully overturned after mass protests and the launch of the Strike Germany action, which called for a boycott of state institutions. Still, Farah’s painting was deemed “inappropriate” and removed, revealing that nonviolent, even latent, critique itself is punished.
Berlin’s mythology of freedom has curdled into provincial repression. Artist Ella CB, in her podcast We Lost the Plot (The Tale and the Tongue, ep. 25), critiques how “culture and remembrance” have been weaponised for fascist politics. And as John Holton wrote in Spike Art Magazine: “What was once an environment that facilitated art and imaginative dreaming has become something of a Potemkin village.”
Despite all this, disillusionment is not my, nor the participants’ in Training for Political Imaginaries‘, default position. Though radically different in scale, quality and consequence, the genocide in Gaza and the destruction of independent dance in Berlin emerge from the same reactionary turn. Both demand solidarity. To fight one without the other is to miss their shared root: the state’s attack on imagination and dissent.
Day 1 — Organising Against Isolation
The first day of the weekend meeting began with the diagnosis that has haunted us for years: fragmentation, exhaustion, atomisation. Without new collective imaginaries, we risk remaining captives of neoliberal time—forever hustling and precarious.
After Hannah Walther and Anika Bendel left, Sonja Hornung, who is is a part of a the Arbeitsgruppe Art Worker Solidarity (a working group of bbk berlin/Professional Association of Visual Artists Berlin), shared rich insight into how the visual arts sector in Berlin campaigns and organises. We imagined new hybrid forms: associations that defend both artistic autonomy and workers’ rights. How to demand fair conditions (sick pay, social security, pensions) within a system accustomed to denying them? How to resist being atomised subjects, competing for scraps of funding and visibility?
We discussed data collection to expose precarity, while acknowledging how metrics can erase lived experience. Siegmar Zacharias cooked a Romanian soup for the break, and each person received €20 for their participation —a small redistribution that both acknowledged and resisted the realities of scarcity.
The afternoon deepened into a conversation about intersecting alliances and institutions that are at work for the field of dance in Berlin and the urgent issues at stake. Freelance Dance Ensemble Berlin was initiated by Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Jared Gradinger, Silke Bake, Sheena McGrandles, Martin Hansen, Jule Flierl, Laurie Young & Siegmar Zacharias. Zacharias and Young have also joined the board of ZTB alongside Julia Laperrière, Ana Laura Lozza, Claudia Garbe and Arantxa Martínez in 2024 in response to the funding cuts. The group addressed the necessity for a fair practice agreement, transparency, gender equity, the struggles many Berlin-based freelancers face with migration, and affirmed compliance with the minimum wage as a baseline for resistance. Laurie referenced the Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists (CADA) as a long-term model of sustainable activism: structured resistance.
Day 2 — Three Horizons
Sunday’s workshop, Exploring Futures – Shaping Change, employed the Three Horizons framework (‘3H’, developed by Bill Sharpe), led by the facilitator Katja Sonnemann, to map systemic transformation across temporal scales:
Horizon 1: Current stateHorizon 2: Disruptive innovationsHorizon 3: Emerging futures
This exercise’s radical potential lies in collapsing what is “realistic.” Our discussion envisioned a dance ecology grounded in resilience and autonomy, free from political and economic control. We imagined structural funding for independent artists, more diverse leadership, and abolition of white supremacist and ableist decision-making. We called for a renewed social valuation of art, for residencies, fair copyright laws, international solidarity and rich criticism cultures.
The conversation moved between the poetic and the practical: Can compassion, rest, and care become economic indicators? How might dance ally with the healthcare and education sectors? How can somatic practices extend beyond studios to social life?
We asked how to fund dance without state complicity. How absurd is the expectation to crowdfund via personal social media platforms for danceWEB scholarships at ImPulstanz, while many in the community are crowdfunding for food and eSIMs in Gaza? While protesting both the state’s cuts to the arts and its support for Israeli arms in the war in Gaza is vital, there’s something disproportionate, illuminated by the algorithm’s homogenising effect on content, about soliciting peer donations for one’s professional endeavours on the same online platforms used to call for lifelines for displaced and starving civilians. The expectation to market one’s artistic work under such conditions is unfair and disillusioning.
How then can dancers fund these endeavours? What forms of protest and activism do we imagine and invent? How to protest and rally for what cause? The group emphasised training for solidarity. We spoke of intergenerational exchange, historical awareness and the need to connect with workers in other precarious sectors—care, cleaning, logistics—to build transversal alliances.
Practical ideas emerged for the next 3–9 months: forming small working groups, developing new governance models and drafting unified messages. Proposals included monthly workshops, open letters, and mutual aid networks. The urgency was to keep visionary thinking and pragmatic action together: to unionise without losing imagination.
Tensions and Contradictions
Inclusion vs Marginalisation:Political radicality demands reflexivity. Who speaks? Who risks more? Who is excluded by language, debt, or ability? The more combative the rhetoric, the greater the vigilance required to unlearn hierarchies within our own scene.
Sustainability vs Momentum: The movement must refuse burnout as praxis. The political imaginary includes rest, recovery, and interdependence as vital forms of resistance.
Demands and Proposals
A loose manifesto emerged:
Hybrid Union Models: Dance-specific associations federating with labour movements rather than merely fitting into them.
Shared Benefit Funds: Health, emergency, and pension pools accessible to independent artists.
Networked Governance: Rotating regional assemblies within TanzAllianzen to deliberate resources and conflicts.
Time Commons: Protected time for rest, reflection, and collective study.
Radical Granting Logic: Funding bodies must cede control—trust collectives and fund the unquantifiable.
Transversal Alliances: Build solidarities between dance, care, education, and climate movements.
Mutual Aid & Redistribution: Distribute surplus, however small, as Siegmar’s soup reminded us: generosity is infrastructure.
Training for Political Imaginaries was a generative confrontation of futures. It staged a refusal: that dance must be tamed by the market, that the artist must be solitary, that creative life is an individual contract with precarity.
From Berlin’s labouring bodies rose a collective dare:
To build dance worlds that resist commodification.
To fold care into structure.
To reject isolation.
To insist that imagination itself is a political infrastructure.
This gathering was an event to spark hope and action—alive, unresolved, contagious. May its embers spread, not only as a network but as a living terrain for solidarity and counterpower.
A collaboration between FreelanceDanceEnsembleBerlin, ZTB e.V. and Tanzbüro Berlin in the frame of TanzAllianzen. TanzAllianzen is funded by the Performing Arts Fund from funds provided by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. The Berlin Satellite is cofinance by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. With the kind support of Diorama.
The current budget cuts threaten the existence, continuity, and future prospects of freelance performing artists and other cultural workers, their infrastructure, and their venues. With the Freelance Dance Ensemble Berlin, we aim to create visibility for the expertise, local and international relevance, and interconnectedness of the dynamic performing arts landscape in Berlin.
Each project application requires time-consuming preparation, which includes the creation of complex time and budget plans and the careful composition of artistic teams. In the last funding round, only around 9% of applications for individual project funding were approved. The conditions and amount of funding do not do justice to the qualitative and creative potential of Berlin's internationally respected contemporary dance/performance art. According to the BFDK system check 2021-23/TanzAgenda24, 92% of dance professionals are solo self-employed and earn €12,231.00 per year at least once over the course of their lives.
We demand a restructuring of Berlin’s funding system in dialogue with the
performing arts community—a forward-looking update that fosters a generative future rather than uninspired cuts that undo the progress of the scene.
● In addition to reversing the cuts, we call for improved working conditions,
including:
● Better (or: adapted) social security provisions
● Simplified labor market access regulations for foreign artists
● Continued payment of wages in the event of illness or accidents at work from
day 1 and access to unemployment insurance adapted to the complex reality
of employment
● Adequately formulated retirement provision, even in the case of changing
employment relationships.
● A commitment from the Berliner Senat to establish sustainable conditions for Berlin-based performing artists and the freelance scene to professionalize
their infrastructures.
The planned cuts and their unilateral implementation—without consulting the people most affected—are, in our eyes, not only a symptom of ignorance towards our already precarious working conditions but also evidence of a lack of understanding of the complex structures that underpin our work. These structures are the foundation for our often interdisciplinary, collaborative, and highly engaged political, social, and performative practices.
We hereby invite Berlin’s cultural senator and other relevant politicians to engage in a dialogue with us to gain a deeper understanding of how we work and what our work requires to thrive.
Being active and self employed in the performing arts today means much more than creating stage works, rehearsing and touring. It also includes artistic research, practices of care, social work, education, political work, grant writing, accounting, continuous learning, teaching, mentoring, management, organizational and production work.
The 100% elimination of funding structures—such as the Diversity Fund, which cultural workers have built over decades—is an act of destruction and disrespect, particularly toward marginalized groups.
However, there are examples of how cultural work can be structured more sustainably. In neighboring countries like France and Belgium, freelance artists have access to the “status d’intermittence,” a system that provides support during periods of unemployment or injury. In an economically strong country like Germany, it is disproportionate that freelance artists work a 40-hour week yet have no prospects of a pension.
Artistic excellence is the result of the dedicated work of many people: competent and highly educated teams that support long creation processes and the continuous financial investment in artistic research and work.
The city of Berlin and its residents deserve a thriving arts scene and artists who are not trapped in precarity.
In light of these funding cuts, we propose initiating a process to formalize our labor, needs, and rights through the development of a union. This would provide a collective voice for an often solitary and fragmented field.
ABOUT Freelance Dance Ensemble Berlin
A loose collective of artists has developed this website to honor their colleagues, highlight the complexity of their work, and fight against the looming budgetary disaster threatening them and their peers.
Initiated by:
Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Jared Gradinger, Silke Bake, Siegmar Zacharias, Sheena McGrandles, Martin Hansen, Jule Flierl & Laurie Young.
We are shocked and disappointed by politicians’ current decision to cut Berlin’s cultural budget by 13%. This demonstrates the complete lack of understanding of Berlin’s unique, diverse and inclusive art scene and what it has to offer to the city. All the protests over the last few weeks – the two big demonstrations ZTB contributed in organizing – seemingly failed to make an impact on the politicians. The senator for culture is tacitly looking away, allowing the independent scene to be dismantled. The uncertainty – the question as to whether or not promised funding will be paid in 2025 – is blocking our work. The situation is dramatic, as never before. Nevertheless, instead of falling into a sense of desperation, let’s continue to gather together, protest and most importantly: stand together in solidarity. We artists demand immediate support from all funded structures, as it is well known, nothing of what Berlin is today could exist without us.
ZTB Zeitgenössischer Tanz Berlin e.V. Board – Julia Barrette-Laperrière, Armin Hokmi, Martha Hincapié Charry, Günther Wilhelm, Jasmin İhraç
Call for Demonstration / September, 13, 2024, 18-20h / Brandenburger TorZTB Zeitgenössischer Tanz Berlin e.V.
10-12% cuts on the Berlin level
50% cuts on the Federal level
Berlin Dance needs you!
Poor but sexy won’t do it this time!
The current cuts in the (federal budget) Federal Cultural Fund of up to 50% and the expected cuts at Berlin level of 10-12% will have devastating consequences for the entire independent scene and dance in particular. The situation for self-employed dance professionals is already catastrophic, with an average annual income below the official poverty line. With further cuts, many of us will no longer be able to pursue our profession. This is unacceptable and, to say the least, a huge loss for the city of Berlin, internationally renowned for its diverse and experimental dance scene. This reputation is fading away as the dance landscape is in danger of being dried up by further cuts. We must fight back!
On 13 September 2024, the Dachverband Tanz is organizing an Action Day in front of the Brandenburg Gate to draw attention to the importance of dance in Germany: the diversity and potential of dance should be made visible in the public space and brought into the political conversation.” A performative supporting program will take place from 3 pm and speeches and statements by politicians and cultural workers are planned from 6 pm to 8 pm. This is exactly when we need you! We are planning a demonstration and want to show together that there are many of us who stand for dance in Berlin. Come with your posters if you like, otherwise we will also provide some on site.
