On the occasion of the inaugural Ensemblefest Berlin 2026, MAM – Manufaktur für aktuelle Musik and NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS present the European premiere of an early composition by the American minimalist pioneer Terry Riley. Composed around the same time as In C, Autumn Leaves follows an open structure in which order and freedom, repetition and transformation continuously intertwine.

Created together with young people from Berlin and Ukraine, the project unfolds as a musical-theatrical experiment in which the familiar boundaries between music, movement, and perception begin to dissolve. Musicians become dancers, listeners become participants, sounds turn into gestures, and gestures into sounds. What is usually kept apart comes together within a shared space of experience.

On Alfred-Scholz-Platz in the heart of Berlin-Neukölln, a landscape of sounds, objects, words, and people invites the audience to move freely—without a fixed perspective or privileged point of view. Proximity and distance, activity and contemplation, individuality and community constantly exchange roles. Together with the falling maple leaves of the surrounding trees, a cycle of becoming and passing unfolds, in which transience is experienced not as loss but as the very condition of renewal: in repetition, difference emerges; in the fleeting, something enduring revealss itself. Terry Riley’s music enters the body—and invites us, if only for a moment, to relate to the world in a different way.