A vibrant opening weekend of this 31st edition of Tanz im August is behind us. Time to assort our impressions and dare to look back:

At the beginning of this festival edition American choreographer Deborah Hay opened the festival with her performances Animals on the Beach & my choreographed body … revisited on 9.8 at HAU1. At Nicola Gunn's Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster the performer shared a bizarre experience and made our audience cry to tears at HAU3. The Canadian choreographer Catherine Gaudet drew aesthetic end ecstatic images in her piece The Fading of the Marvelous at HAU2. The Japanese choreographer and artist Hiroaki Umeda invited the audience to have a surprising sensory experience in his Haptic Installation. The playful and colourful tape installation and durational performance Fluid Grounds by Par B.L.eux / Benoît Lachambre and Sophie Corriveau at KINDL – Zentrum für zeitgenössiche Kunst engaged audiences of all ages to dwell in the changing space. In MONUMENT 0.7: M/OTHERS the Berlin based choreographer Eszter Salamon invited her mother to the meditative piece about human connection and intergenerational experiences at St. Elisabeth-Kirche.

Already on 8.8. the video installation Perception Unfolds by Deborah Hayin opened its doors at Akademie der Künste (Pariser Platz). This impressive work on four screens can still be experienced until 31.8., from Thursdays to Sundays. Also, open at the Akademie der Künste is the Deborah Hay Documentation Center by Laurent Pichaud with original documents and artefacts from Deborah Hay's personal archive.