Dancing with our Neighbours

Where is the boundary between the inside and the outside of theatre? What happens to the theatre when its immediate neighbourhood takes over the power of shaping the show?

In a continued development of the premiere version of “Dancing with our Neighbours”, which took place in Berlin, the performance collective Gob Squad is joined by people from Leipzig and its surroundings in a playful exploration of issues of identity and belonging. The performance brings a diverse group of people onto the stage who choreograph personal stories – if you agree, you join the dance. The boundaries between people and between stage and audience are undermined. The communal dance about individual life stories creates unifying elements which can be seen as symbols for human and social issues of our times. In a very distinctive way, the audience experiences the theatre as a place for participation and dance as a means of creating temporary communities. In this performative disco about differences and similarities, the question of who represents whom in the theatre is answered in a very local manner. This says a lot about the future role and mandate of the theatre: Live your togetherness and celebrate our society’s diversity!.

The premiere version was created in Berlin-Kreuzberg, with the community in the neighbourhood of HAU Hebbel am Ufer, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the performance group Gob Squad. For the 12th edition of the festival Politik im Freien Theater, the group will develop a local adaptation.

Gob Squad is a seven-person bi-sexual, bi-national and bi-lingual artists’ collective. Since 1994, the German-British group has been working on conceiving, staging and presenting live-performances on the borderlines between theatre, art and media.