With works by Ley Akpinar, Cecilia Xuetong Feng and Luisa Möller , Now & Next

Crying Diamonds portrays a puppet-like figure on pleasers, embodying the absolute adaptation to external expectations. She learns to use her body not for herself, but for the gaze of others. What begins as an external demand slowly seeps inward: form, movement, and presentation become a deeply internalized, automated body language. Her trained body simply carries out its commands.

On extreme platforms, the trained performance collides with a longing for vulnerable humanity. The figure becomes a living doll, trapped in the compulsion to constantly perform and present herself. She exists only through her performance, until the perfectly constructed façade collapses under its own pressure.

Ley Akpinar is a performer and choreographer and has been studying Physical Theatre at the Folkwang University of the Arts since 2025. Shaped by her experience in Latin dance, show dance, and modelling, she is familiar with performance-driven structures and the pressure to optimize, control, and present one’s body. Out of a desire to break through this learned movement language and rediscover her body beyond performance and achievement, her artistic work Crying Diamonds emerged. The piece explores adaptation, self-discipline, and the moment when control begins to tip. In Crying Diamonds, she examines a body that has learned to function until the perfect façade begins to crack.

Concept, choreography, performance: Ley Akpinar; Music: Elisey Krupenkov; Dramaturgy: Belendjwa Peter, Clara Rosa Hilscher

A dancer becomes the antagonist in her own inner horror film, confronting her own fears. Between distorted movements and states of physical tension, breaking becomes a tool for making inner states visible and physically tangible. Something unsettling seems to be lurking, waiting. But where does it come from?

Set against a soundscape inspired by video games, the piece creates an intense and atmospheric world, asking what we find when we look into the darkest corners of our imagination.

Born in Thuringia, Luisa Möller has been breaking since 2011 and has increasingly worked in the stage context since 2017. Her artistic focus lies on experimental and improvisational formats. Among other projects, she performed in Urban Creation, a production by Daniela Rodriguez Romero. In 2025, she created her first solo, This is not real.

Concept, choreography, dance, sound: Luisa Möller; Support (lighting, dramaturgy): Philipp Raiß

The piece unfolds as a construction site of everyday happenings and, at the same time, as a mining site of remembrance. Multiple facets of recent experiences are unearthed and unveiled through Live Cinema, as if from stratified earth accumulated over time.

An imaginative film set overlays the stage, inviting the audience onto a voyeuristic journey of watching takes framed by imaginary cameras beyond the stage and within the audience. Charged with multiple directions of gaze and the cinematic treatment of time, everyday gestures are decomposed into ambiguous fragments, opening onto other possible narratives.

Within this shifting field, power and vulnerability can coexist; as in memory, one is perpetrator, victim, and spectator at once.

Cecilia Xuetong Feng is a choreographer and scenographer. With a background in architecture, dance, and media arts, she creates multidisciplinary performances and installations that explore the mechanisms of perception and the apparatus of gaze. Growing up within restrictive social structures, she finds freedom in the refuge of imagination and builds shelter through artistic practice for herself and others.

concept/direction: Cecilia Xuetong Feng; performance: Marta Pisano, Pier Paolo Lara ; music composition: Helin Korkmaz; costume design: Ama Tomberli