We, Nara Virgens and Makisig Akin, join forces for the Emerging Change Tanzfestival to imagine a completely new format of a QTBIPoC dance festival in Berlin, one of the leading international cities for dance and performance.
Makisig is a freelance trans, queer dancer, choreographer, and curator based in Berlin, born and raised in the Philippines. Nara is a queer, Brazilian/Afro-German curator, DJ, and production manager at Tanzfabrik, who grew up between Brazil and Germany. Both our identities move within the intersections that are QTBIPoC.
In telling the story of our festival, we consciously write from a "we" perspective — it marks the depth of collaboration we pursue together. Through our lived experiences, shared and divergent, we felt and recognized the structural erasure of QTBIPoC artists, curators, and production teams in the dance field at every level. The brutal realities of racism, tokenism, and isolation playing out in exhausting, confusing, and painful ways. We recognized deep systemic gaps in Berlin's free dance scene. Together, we started imagining something else.
Together, we started actioning.
Over years of friendship, collaboration, sustained kitchen conversations, and visioning practices, in 2023 we realized that we couldn’t wait for someone else to make what we imagined. We decided to create a dance festival together without knowing how it would become possible. Inspired by adrienne maree brown's book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, we envisioned a festival format and organizational practice inspired by the rhizomatic resilience of a mushroom's life cycle.
Together, we conceived of the Emerging Change Tanzfestival: a vibrant, risk-taking, and tender festival designed to bring Berlin stakeholders face-to-face with cutting-edge experimental dance, firmly placing the spotlight on QTBIPoC dance artists, curators, and the production team as powerful agents of change and transformation. Emerging Change Tanzfestival became a labor of love and a leap of faith—building the team, the relationships, and the skills to make something that seemed impossible become a reality. In 2024, we received Hauptstadt Kulturfonds and an IMPACT grant to make the first edition happen. For the 2026 and 2027 editions, the festival is supported by Spartenoffeneförderung.
Emerging Change Tanzfestival not only changes the dance artists who are featured and represented, but also the decision-makers inside of the team—and consequently the audience and beyond. We knew the power and limitations of the two of us. We knew we needed to build a collective. And we did. Ogechi Krämer and Anya Cloud were our first collaborators in writing the funding application—a collaboration that continues through today and into the future. From there the team was built from friends, colleagues, artists, and extended community, with every person learning and taking on positions outside their areas of expertise—for the love of dance and the vision of something more just, equitable, and sustainable—to learn, grow, and build relationships from the inside. Many people on the 2024 festival team are continuing with us for the 2026 festival. What can we do together that we cannot do alone?
We continue to ask the vital question: What do we need in order for QTBIPoC dance artists to be able to grow together in the harsh realities of the independent dance scene?
The Emerging Change Tanzfestival is a space for celebration and possibility. We believe in supporting the excellence of QTBIPoC transdisciplinary dance artists while investing in the promotion of complex intersectional interdependence and collectivity. It is a visionary proposal that encourages connection, discussion and engagement across people experiencing racism, gender and sexuality boundaries while actively working to dismantle white supremacy, heteronormativity, ableism, and patriarchy. Emerging Change Tanzfestival, as a QTBIPoC-centered festival, creates a tangible action toward inclusivity. In this festival, we envision a future with structural equality and practice it in every facet of our program. We believe that time, space, community and resources are the basic requirements for such a proposal. And it takes time. We are still learning. The collective power of this festival is much greater than the sum of its parts. Emerging Change Tanzfestival, we hope, will help bring Berlin to the forefront of positive change in the international field of dance and performance.
Nara is a producer, curator, and DJ with a passion for dancing and connecting people. Raised in Rio de Janeiro and living in Berlin for 19 years, she has been active in the dance, performance, and queer party scene ever since. Nara currently heads the production department at Tanzfabrik Berlin and has been an active member of produktionsbande - network performing arts producers since its founding. Additionally, she is a co-founder and co-curator of Emerging Change Tanzfestival, a dance festival that centers Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (QTBIPoC) artists. They curate projects with the aim to transform structures and to create access, equity, and support networks where the QTBIPoC community is present.
@nizingahttps://soundcloud.com/naradj
I am a queer, transgender Filipino born choreographer, dance artist, facilitator, and activist. I was born and raised in the Philippines and am currently based in Berlin. My work focuses on the recognition of intersectional identities, reconnecting with my ancestry, and decentralizing Western ideologies in dance making. Holding spaces for Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (QTBIPoC) is an integral part of my artist activism. I hold spaces choreographically, curatorially, and educationally by examining how survival strategies can be translated into a communal physical practice for creative healing. Important collaborators and teachers include mayfield brooks, Jason Tsou, Anya Cloud, Nara Virgens, Eric Geiger, Ajani Brannum, and taisha paggett, among others. I co-founded The Love Makers Company with Anya Cloud, a project-based dance company. I also co-founded Emerging Change Tanzfestival with Nara Virgens, a dance festival featuring and curating QTBIPoC artists and their collaborators.
www.thelovemakerscompany.com@makisigakin
Céline Rodrigues Monteiro (they) is an Afro-Luxembourgish multidisciplinary artist, producer, and cultural worker based in Berlin. With a background in early childhood education, they work across dance, performance, film, and curation, both in front of and behind the scenes. As a disabled cultural worker, Céline brings a perspective shaped by care and accessibility. They collaborate with inspiring independent artists and institutions including HKW, Sophiensæle, Tanzfabrik, Radialsystem and HAU.
Diethild Meier is a freelance dance artist, dramaturg and curator based in Berlin. She studied Dance, Context, Choreography at the HZT Berlin (BA 2015) and has since worked in various creative positions in dance productions in the independent scene. Together with Julek Kreutzer, Diethild has been curating the A.PART festival for young Berlin dance artists at ada Studio Berlin since 2020. She is currently working as a creative producer in the team of the Emerging Change Dance Festival.
VISÁL KIM is a Berlin-based creative, cultural producer, photographer and DJ of Cambodian heritage, shaped by growing up between Honduras, Guatemala and Germany. Working across the performing arts and nightlife, his practice moves between creative direction, communication, PR, marketing and cultural production. He leads the communication strategy for Emerging Change Tanzfestival. His independent photography and music practice explores questions of identity, community and belonging. He is a member of Angels in Disguise, a Rotterdam-based ballroom-rooted DJ collective. His photography has been exhibited at Schwules Museum Berlin, as well as in Zürich and Prishtina, Kosovo.
Aline Juárez is a Mexico City-born director and cinematographer whose work explores migrant communities, diaspora, and the relationship between body, territory, and memory, building bridges between Latin America and Europe. She holds an MA in Directing from Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, studied Cinematography at filmArche e.V. and Cultural Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her work as a screenwriter was awarded Best Screenplay at the Usina de Guiones of Instituto Cervantes, and as an editorial photographer she has collaborated with Der Freitag, Neues Deutschland, and Lateinamerika Nachrichten.
Berlin-based Brazilian DJ, host, curator and graphic artist Rafush claims their space in the scene, advocating for diversity and awareness. They co-founded the afro-futuristic collective Yoko Yoko, and the music collective “ouch,” promoting inclusivity. Rafush co-hosts shows on Cashmere Radio and co-curates the Karl Kutter Stage at Fusion Festival. With a passion for pushing boundaries, Rafush is a driving force in Berlin's music and cultural scene.
Inky Lee (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist and a writer living in Berlin. Their work creates space for the embodied experiences of marginalized individuals and communities to be acknowledged, mourned for, and celebrated. Their artistic practice resists societal norms of ableism, neuronormativity, and heteronormativity, aspiring toward radical empathy, care, and love. In their work, Inky looks for ways to be direct and tender at once.
I am an experimental contemporary dance artist originally from Alaska and currently based between Berlin and Colorado. As a queer white person I cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice. Collaboration is central to all my work. I co-direct The Love Makers Company with Makisig Akin. I currently teach at the University of Colorado Boulder and at festivals and workshops internationally.
simo_tier is a multi-media artist and activist, influenced by its lived reality as a disabled, Indigenous, agender, white, gay, AuDHD femme. It is deeply passionate about lifting up and supporting QTBIPoC voices and projects, as well as breaking down barriers to create a community based on Disability Justice and reformative change. It is living, working, and
studying in Berlin.
Ogechi is a care worker, performance artist/bodyworker, writer and parent to Zuri. Over the years they have been part of the evolving of various performance-based bodies of work. Growing up as a black kid within the German foster care system, their practice often touches themes of blackqueer belonging, (un)rooting, afrohair politics and beyondness (referring to "unterwegs" as in May Ayims poem sein oder nicht sein). Ogechi is based between Stuttgart and Berlin.
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