BERLIN.- The Neue Nationalgalerie will once again turn its celebrated Mies van der Rohe building into a stage this September, bringing dance, performance and architecture together for the fifth edition of PERFORM!, its annual performance art festival held during Berlin Art Week.
Running from September 9 through 13, the 2026 programme is anchored by a landmark of postmodern dance: Trisha Brown's Walking on the Wall, first performed at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. More than half a century later, the work will be restaged against one of modern architecture's most recognizable settings—the glass faade of the Neue Nationalgalerie.
Brown's deceptively simple idea remains striking. Seven dancers, attached to ropes and harnesses, move horizontally along a wall as though gravity had suddenly shifted direction. Developed during a period when Brown was experimenting with buildings, equipment and everyday movement, the piece helped push dance beyond the conventional stage and into direct conversation with architecture.
In Berlin, that conversation gains another dimension. Brown's performers will move across the exterior of Mies van der Rohe's transparent steel-and-glass building, transforming a structure usually experienced as solid and immovable into part of the choreography itself. Performances will take place daily from September 9 to 12 at 5 p.m., with two presentations on September 13.
The festival has built its identity around precisely this dialogue between performance history and contemporary practice. Earlier editions took works or artistic positions associated with Simone Forti, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer and Joan Jonas as their starting points. This year, Brown's legacy serves as a springboard for performances by Kian Del Valle, Miriam Kongstad, Deva Schubert and Josh Johnson.
Among the most ambitious new works is Kian Del Valle's INSTRUCCIONES PARA EXISTIR (INSTRUCTIONS FOR EXISTING), created with the KDV Performance Group specifically for the Neue Nationalgalerie. Inspired in part by Brown's experiments with bodies and buildings, the work places performers within formations that alternate between avant-garde dance and the disciplined movement of a tactical unit.
With an original score by Devont Hynes, Del Valle's piece imagines a future in the year 3036 in which nostalgia and memories of former selves have disappeared and militarization has entered the routines of daily life. Movement becomes a way of examining authority and resistance, surveillance and intimacy, and the tension between collective discipline and individual vulnerability.
Del Valle, who works between Berlin and Los Angeles and was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, has developed a practice spanning dance, film, installation, sound, stunt work and performance. Her work often draws on science fiction, psychology, mysticism and dystopian scenarios, using the body as both an expressive instrument and a site of physical endurance.
On the festival's final day, the programme expands further with three works that approach the body from very different directions.
Danish choreographer and visual artist Miriam Kongstad will present Hard Play, a work that looks at children's games as places where gender roles and social expectations begin to take shape. A 1.5-metre braid attached to the performer becomes, by turns, the flowing hair of a princess, a dog leash, a lasso, a skipping rope and a whip. The playful objects gradually reveal the structures of identity and behavior hidden inside familiar childhood rituals.
Berlin-based artist Deva Schubert, meanwhile, turns to the mouth as both an instrument and an unstable social space in vocal collisions (variations on the mouth). Five performers create shifting arrangements of microtonal sound, moving between tenderness and confrontation as voices connect, interrupt and collide. A soundtrack by Davide Luciani accompanies the choreography.
The afternoon also includes Josh Johnson's In My Garden, a solo performance built around ideas of falling, dispersal and renewal. Rather than treating disappearance as an ending, Johnson approaches it as part of a natural cycle: what falls away may return to the ground and eventually make another form of growth possible. The work draws inspiration from Toni Morrison's reflections on historical change and natural life cycles.
Johnson, a Los Angeles-born dancer and choreographer, has performed with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and the Forsythe Company and has collaborated with artists including Anne Imhof, Kandis Williams, Wu Tsang and boychild.
Together, the works make this year's PERFORM! less a conventional festival than a temporary laboratory for examining what happens when bodies encounter buildings, histories and systems of control. Brown's dancers defy gravity on the museum wall; Del Valle's ensemble negotiates the boundaries between choreography and militarized order; Kongstad turns children's play into a study of social conditioning; Schubert breaks speech into bodily sound; and Johnson looks toward regeneration after disappearance.
Curated by Neue Nationalgalerie director Klaus Biesenbach, curator Lisa Botti, and Volkswagen Group curator Gregor Quack, PERFORM! continues the museum's effort to treat performance not as an addition to its collection and architecture, but as a way of experiencing both differently.
All festival performances take place in areas of the Neue Nationalgalerie that can be accessed without a museum ticket. Admission is first-come, first-served when capacity is limited.
