In a city already suspended between past and becoming, Ballet Sur_real unveils Modalities of Me — a dance not of narrative but of states. From 17–21 September 2025, the former industrial shell of Monopol Berlin is transformed into something intimate, volatile and strangely tender. Here, in a space once built for function and fire, now repurposed for art, we’re invited not merely to watch but to feel, to trespass into the deep interior of the self. There is no linearity here. No tidy arc. Only five figures, not characters but forces, each embodying a modality of being: power, chaos, duplicity, fragility, ferality. They slip between these identities like shadows shifting under moving light. Choreographed by Soraya Schulthess and Renato De Leon, the piece refuses the old logic of beginning and end. Instead, it becomes a choreography of confrontation, between body and space, desire and distortion, the digital and the deeply human.
The stage is not a stage. It is a life-size installation by Swiss collective Encor Studio, a living organism of glass, sunlight and electrochromic films. Walls breathe. Light pulses in sync with atmosphere. Here, architecture does not frame the dance, it becomes it. Movement and material are inseparable as dancers flow through a space that remembers its industrial past yet vibrates with new language. The performance begins with a solo by Tess Voelker, formerly of Nederlands Dans Theater, a quiet reckoning of presence and memory. She moves not to impress but to remember, each gesture an echo of something once felt but never spoken. Hers is the body’s confession.
Underneath it all pulses the music, dark, raw and hypnotic. Ogtrues, the Berlin-based producer, creates sonic architecture just as vital as the walls around it. Alongside him, VINVAR of Georgia’s queer collective fluid.vision folds emotional resonance into every layer. It is not sound as backdrop, it is sound as blood. Modalities of Me dares to ask what happens when identity, love and longing are filtered through algorithms, clubs and capitalism. It does not offer an answer. It offers an aperture. An opening. A place to sit with volatility.
This is not ballet in the traditional sense. This is Ballet Sur_real, DANCÆ’s signature ensemble, where classical discipline meets immersive experimentation. Where dance becomes a language for everything we cannot explain but continue to live through. In Modalities of Me, the body is not a site of mastery but of question. A mirror. A membrane. A fracture. Attending the premiere felt less like witnessing a performance and more like stepping into a mirror, not to see oneself clearly but to feel seen in the most invisible of ways. Words orbit the experience but never quite land. For five nights in Berlin, that fracture is made visible and strangely beautiful.
