Chiara Bersani , Will You become a Zombie with Me?

Choreographer and dancer Chiara Bersani invites her audience to an extraordinary Halloween gathering. As part of the Tanzt euch zusammen! Choreografien der Begegnung series, she transforms a pool into a queer-crip space for transformation, exchange, and new forms of community. Starting point will be a playful take on figures from horror and pop culture: Zombies, creatures, and other in-between beings appear as figures of desire, resistance, and community here. In collaboration with local artists and the Get Over It Collective, she creates an eerie yet loving gathering with drag, experimental sounds, and performative interventions.

“Will you become a zombie with me?”, Chiara Bersani asks in her poetic texts that accompany the project. Zombies become figures of a resisting livelihood – bodies that dance, desire, and experience joy. “The most ancient form of resistance is our bodies refusing to disappear.” Water will be the space for this transformation. In the pool, habitual movement patterns dissolve, new forms of physical expression can be experienced. Here, movements come up, perception shifts, as new possibilities emerge. Queer perspectives, disability politics and artistic practice come together in a shared space of experience.

We love to dance in the sun waiting for the night.
We love to dance at dusk while the world holds its breath.
Dancing in apnea.
Dancing between times.
One moment before the night arrives
We
Find each other.

The world is on fire my love and we move forward.
Today we decided not to die.

Will you become a zombie with me?

The most ancient form of resistance
is our bodies refusing to disappear,
refusing to die.

Will you become a zombie with me?

Still moving forward? Still dancing?
Still desiring?
Still feeling pleasure?

I’ll wait for you in the water, my love,
where muscles dissolve,
where we can sink,
become again the fish we once were 
gills, tails, luminous depths.

Here we discover what gravity
does not allow us to do.
Our queer bodies shine beneath the surface
and then burst through it.

Come, my love, as you are.
Come as you will want to be.
Come already dead and already alive.
Transform. 

(Chiara Bersani)

Estimated duration of the event: 4 hours.

Choreographer and disability rights activist Chiara Bersani works at the intersection of art, body politics, and societal participation. In her works, she questions dominant notions of body, visibility, and normativity while developing poetic spaces for different forms of community.  The cooperation for Tanzt euch zusammen! Choreografien der Begegnung is her third collaboration with tanzhaus nrw. Most recently, Bersani took part in the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026. In 2025, she won the prestigious ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, and today, she is among the most remarkable international artists who indivisibly join aesthetic practice and social questions.