Germany’s largest and most important festival for Disability & Performing Arts, “NO LIMITS,” once again takes place this year in cooperation with HAU Hebbel am Ufer. For the first time, an artist with disability, the Viennese choreographer Michael Turinsky, will take over the co-curation of the festival – together with Marcel Bugiel – transforming it into a laboratory of productive deviations. Under Turinsky’s influence, this year’s programme will focus on dance. The majority of the projects invited are created by disabled artists – who themselves determine how they want to be represented on stage.
The festival opens with “Gentle Unicorn” by Chiara Bersani, a headstrong and humorous dance solo in which the 98 cm tall performer transforms herself into a unicorn. The British Live Art artist Jo Bannon is represented here with two works: With “Exposure,” a one-spectator performance about the possibility of seeing oneself and others in a different light, and with “We Are Fucked”, a subtle and mad dance piece about feminism, about the present state of our world and about being constantly shaken. The performance group Monster Truck stages Peter Weiss’ “Marat/Sade” with amateur performers from Bochum with cognitive impairments; the inclusive Unmute Dance Company takes the people of Pompeii, fossilized in volcanic ash, as the starting point for a moving dance piece about the social situation in South Africa. The festival also presents video works by Alexandrina Hemsley and Dejan Suljan as well as the durational performance “Borg” by Anna Berndtson.
This year’s “NO LIMITS” symposium is about “Exploding Times, Displaced Spaces: Disability Art & Crip Spacetime.” The minimalist-extravagant highlight of the festival is “Cherophobia” by Noëmi Lakmaier, a poetic spectacle of standstill, in which the artist will float in HAU1 for ten hours, buoyed by 20,000 colourful, helium-filled balloons.
