Kulturstreifzug The column reports on two "Tanz im August" guest performances, "Cantatatanz" in the Zionskirche, the opening premiere of "Nathan der Weise" at the DT and Wannsee readings. Voronia: At Tanz im August, the first thing to do is get sucked in. This week, dance dominated Berlin's playbills. On the home stretch of the "Tanz im August" festival, there were two guest performances by illustrious names. Voronia by the Catalan group La Veronal at the Schaubühne, however, disappointed completely. André Sokolowski (Kultura-extra) was annoyed by apocalyptic art honey, Frank Schmid tried to gain something from the vale of tears in his kulturradio review, but also had to draw the bitter conclusion that this evening tips over into "pathos-soaked mummery dance". While the audience takes their seats, the ensemble members from Barcelona are busy on stage, wiping the floor for the start of the season: dressed in white institutional clothing, they go to work thoroughly with vacuum cleaner, rag and mop. It would have been best if they had left it at that; the next seventy minutes are nothing but a lovelessly slapped-together smorgasbord of puzzled motifs from the history of art and religion. The evening is lost in irrelevance between an elevator to hell, a blank slate, a polar bear mask, a little boy, a lamb, and the brief appearance of four naked men desperately banging on the wall. The whole thing is underpinned by bombastic operatic sounds, the dancers writhing painfully in contortions. Surprisingly, not many more visitors left early. The advance praise was great; at "Tanz im August" 2014, the group "La Veronal" was considered the surprise hit of the festival with its previous piece Siena. Their new performance, however, thoroughly failed. Bul-ssang: Colorful dance guest performance from South Korea More coherent was the guest performance of the Korea National Contemporay Dance Company at the Volksbühne: "Bul-ssang" by Anh Aesson dates from 2009 and is a candy-colored mix that lets tradition and modernity collide. To the cool beats of DJ Soulscape (at stage right), the fifteen artists dance and jump through a course of Buddha statues and consumer temples. The attempt to show the Asian country's turmoil between the preservation of traditional values and Gangnam Style turbo-acceleration comes across a bit flat at times. Nevertheless, Ahn Aesson and her lively ensemble have to be credited for developing a coherent and entertaining choreography from their basic idea. But their concept would hardly have lasted more than 60 minutes. Cantata dance: Bach with dancer in the Zion church nave A marked contrast to this South Korean guest performance was provided by the group Nico and the Navigators with their revival of Cantatatanz (from 2011) in the Zion Church. Protestant, sparse austerity and the world-weariness of Johann Sebastian Bach's cantatas reigned in the sacred space that evening. Japanese dancer Yui Kawaguchi first enters the sanctuary veiled, almost as if under a burka, while countertenor Terry Wey sings his "Bist Du bei mir, geh ich mit Freuden zum Sterben und zu meiner Ruh." (BWV 508) intones. The two circle each other for the next nearly 75 minutes, gradually taking up more space and navigating the entire nave, so that those in the front seats have the choice of craning their necks or, for long stretches, just taking in the music without the scenic images. This experiment, Bach's "ascetic simplicity" and "mathematical clarity" ("Nico and the Navigators" founder Nicola Hümpel in an interview with the city magazine tip) has its aesthetic appeal. Towards the end, however, the piece would have benefited from a stronger directorial touch, as some lengths crept in. What are we dealing with in this clash of dance and Christian baroque music in a religious space? Hümpel demarcates himself in the aforementioned interview: "No, because we are not dance. We have always been: neither. We are music theater in a certain, as yet undefined sense. In the meantime, we are no longer picture theater, either, because we think that's bad!" Consequently, this evening was not part of the "Tanz im August" festival, but stood entirely on its own in the Berlin cultural scene, supported by federal and state funds. Thematically, however, Cantatatanz, with its questions about dying, the afterlife and religion, ties in precisely with the Deutsche Theater Berlin's season motto "Der leere Himmel" ("Empty Heaven"), which artistic director Ulrich Khuon presented with his directors, dramaturges and actors at the "Früh-Stücke" matinee. A coincidence in the design of the program? Or research material for sociologists, cultural and religious studies scholars, who in a few years could look more closely at what this concentrated examination of the last things says about a society that, between aid packages for Greece and attacks on refugee homes, is clearly struggling to find a new footing? Andreas Kriegenburg lets Lessing's "Nathan the Wise" sink into clay and corny jokes at DT's opening of the season In the season-opening production of Nathan the Wise, there was little sign of a serious examination of the major themes that programmatically preceded this season. Andreas Kriegenburg has his ensemble (including above all his proven regulars Elias Arens, Jörg Pose and Natali Seelig) waddle across the stage for three hours in Buster Keaton style and rattle off classic texts far too quickly. The program announced the production as an "archaic comic". The result was an evening with clay-stained, pitiful characters that was not even half as funny as it would have liked to be. The Ring Parable, which for once Jörg Pose did not make fun of, seemed as out of place here as at a children's birthday party, which the SZ felt reminded of. After the break it didn't get much better, the rows had thinned out considerably in the meantime. On stage, the joking, pattering and waddling continued, accompanied by a mishmash of twenties light music, only briefly interrupted by mutual admonitions of the actors: "Lessing, biiiiiitttte!" For the final applause, instead of the big reconciliation and embrace scene in Lessing's original, they had come up with another gag: one after the other came forward - how could it be otherwise, of course, waddling again - and stared skeptically into the audience, their hands resting on their chins. That many in the audience looked back just as perplexed and with the same pose was at least one of the few funny moments of this season-opening premiere, which left a lot of room for improvement, as the Tagesspiegel rightly wrote. Rowohlt Birthday at Wannsee with Titanic, Horst Evers, Herfried Münkler, Ulrich Matthes and Tschick Those who needed some fresh air afterwards were well catered for in perfect summer weather at Wannsee: There, Rowohlt Berlin Verlag celebrated its 25th birthday party in the villa of the Literary Colloquium Berlin. There was a dense crowd on the narrow paths through the garden, and the audience shuttled between the terrace and the rotunda by the lake, where the publisher's figureheads read appetizers from their new publications. In his conversation with SZ editor Jens Bisky, political scientist Herfried Münkler resolutely opposed an overly idealistic view of the world: for example, he said, Egyptian President al-Sisi was an indispensable anchor of stability in the arc of crisis between Libya and Syria. Münkler rejected criticism from NGOs that the red carpet was rolled out for the authoritarian ruler during his state visit to Berlin in May, and warned that without his regime, the situation for Israel could become even more precarious. Bisky's conclusion that these were not particularly comforting prospects was countered by Münkler with his smug smile, saying that he was not a pastor and that consolation was not his job. As expected, the mood was much more cheerful during the appearances of Titanic editors-in-chief Oliver Maria Schmidt and Martin Sonneborn and year-end team member Horst Evers. The two satirists read a few samples from their soon-to-be-released best-of volume "Titanic Boygroup Greatest Hits - 20 Jahre Krawall für Deutschland" (Titanic Boygroup Greatest Hits - 20 Years of Riots for Germany): when they pretended to be the successor party to the NSDAP in the 1990s and demanded access to old accounts at Swiss banks; or when they parodied Twitter novice Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel with a fake account and caused some confusion on the net during the Hessian state parliament election campaign. Horst Evers then made the audience laugh with a few samples of his short stories about the absurdities of everyday life: he reckoned with the adversities of a reading tour to the Wilstermarsch region because of an overambitious organizer and let a mail dialogue about an online massage lead to a grotesque fantasy story about rubber trees with a CIA spy mission The highlight of the long afternoon and evening was the reading of some passages from Wolfgang Herrndorf's novel Tschick by Ulrich Matthes. There's probably no need to advertise this book anymore: the laconic tone of this Brandenburg trip by three pubescents full of whimsical supporting characters manages, even when rereading and listening to it, to touch its audience one moment and make them laugh the next. Matthes reported that when the book was published, he stayed up late into the night reading it and suggested to the Intendant that he read it at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. The stage version with Sven Fricke, Thorsten Hierse and Wiebke Mollenhauer has become a long-running hit since its premiere in 2011, and the next performances at the Kammerspiele are already sold out again. The German Stage Association reported in a season review that Tschick was even performed more often than Goethe's Faust.

When the divine reveals itself in pure superhuman artistic effort, then, in baroque music, it is inextricably linked with one name: Johann Sebastian Bach. No other composer equated soundscapes so boldly and decidedly with the most profound creeds; no other put his genius so much to the service of his God. In their staged concert "Cantatatanz", the ensemble Nico and the Navigators provide an updated view of his sprawling legacy. A highlight in all this is Oliver Proske's stage design: in the beginning, the old church pews counter the perspective of the audience-congregation, but gradually the hard Protestant seats go from the horizontal to the vertical position, becoming pillars that can be effortlessly rotated and shifted around. They provide the performers with plenty of scope for play – from trying to climb up them, using the armrests to loom over the collective ignorance below, while the famous violin chaconne plays, to a kind of dreamy sliding about. The musicians are included in the action to a greater degree, taking part in scenes in which human beings discover each other in a music made in God's honour.