We live in an age that confuses speed with direction. Everything moves — markets, data, people, opinions — and still, the world feels stuck. Progress has become a screensaver, endlessly looping, a performance we’re all trapped inside. The old promise of better tomorrows has curdled into something else: an endless rehearsal of crisis, streamed in real time. Few artists translate that tension — between acceleration and paralysis — into physical language as precisely as Constanza Macras. Her new piece, Goodbye Berlin, premiering at the Volksbühne, takes that global exhaustion and filters it through the myth of a city that never learned to rest. Berlin loves to mythologise itself. Cabaret ghosts, club bathrooms at dawn — a city that feeds on its own chaos and calls it liberation. The decadence is never just decoration; it’s survival. Here, exhaustion masquerades as glamour, collapse becomes choreography, and even decay insists on being seen. Berlin performs constantly, beautifully, obsessively — as if visibility itself could keep the darkness at bay.

In Goodbye Berlin, Macras and her company Dorky Park pull that myth apart and ask what still beats beneath the glitter. They return to a city haunted by its own legend: the Weimar era’s promise of liberation, the ruins of revolution, the feverish wish to dance while everything burns. Their Berlin is both mirror and mirage — part requiem, part rebellion, a body in perpetual tension between ecstasy and fatigue. It is a portrait of freedom that has lost its innocence, and of desire that can’t be separated from fear. Macras, born in Buenos Aires and trained in dance and fashion, has lived in Berlin since the 1990s — long enough to see its utopias rise and sink again. With Dorky Park, the company she founded in 2003, she has built a language that moves between theatre and installation, humour and collapse. From Hell on Earth to Megalopolis, her works trace how communities move through crisis, turning choreography into social archaeology: every gesture a piece of evidence, every body a record of survival. Now, with Goodbye Berlin, she returns to the Volksbühne to restage the city’s most dangerous love story — its addiction to freedom. The piece looks back at the Weimar era, that shimmering hinge between decadence and downfall, and holds it against the flickering present. What if we are once again dancing at the edge of something we can’t yet name — a century later, still mistaking movement for progress?

Vakuum talked with Constanza Macras about bodies as political archives, care as rebellion, and why fragility belongs at the center of the stage.

Goodbye Berlin revisits the spirit of the Weimar era through a contemporary lens. What did that historical moment reveal to you about the times we live in now?

The similarities in aspects of Berlin are most obvious in how the city is seen: as a capital of club life, a sex-positive city, drug-fueled and slowly descending into economic crisis. The Weimar Republic was much wilder than nowadays, but the ascent of the far right, the militarization and the increasing anti-foreigner sentiment feel dangerously close. In the Weimar Republic we saw the rise of mass media, film and propaganda as powerful tools influencing public opinion and political movements. We now live in a digital age in which social media plays a similar role, shaping narratives, sometimes fueling division, misinformation and extremism.

Your works often move between chaos and choreography, between collapse and creation. How do you translate that tension into movement?

The chaos is always choreographed. Everything in my works is choreographed. It is a choice to make it look in a way that can be seen as chaos, because that for me is essentially movement. I am obsessed with the movement and choreographies of big cities and what that generates in the body language and spatial choreography of masses. That is one aspect I strive to capture – this tension is movement.

You’ve described the body as a political space, one that remembers, resists, and revolts. How does that idea manifest in this piece?

In this piece, there is material that was developed inspired by expressionist dance and by revisitations of existing expressionist works. There is also a radical form of kindness that we explore in certain parts of the piece as the strongest form of revolt against the violence that lurks in times of rising far-right hate speech and the fear of a possible impending war.

You reference figures like Anita Berber and Valeska Gert – radical women who turned performance into revolt. What do they mean to you today?

Our references in the piece are small reconstructions. For me today, their resilience and unapologetic art are still a major landmark of what we should aspire to as artists: to not conform and to be true to oneself until the end.

Do you see the stage as a safe space for resistance, or rather as a place where fragility becomes visible?

I think it is both. Exposing fragility in times of Darwinian “survival of the fittest” mindset can be a strong resistant alternative.

The piece connects the Weimar era with today’s city – both moments of freedom and crisis. What do these two Berlins have in common for you?

 I think escapism and the downplaying of the fact that fascism is not anymore a faraway menace but a real present threat manifested before our eyes daily are common issues. Also, the fact that politics seem to want to place that threat in othering but not in something that lies within Berlin’s citizens.

 Is Berlin still the dangerously beautiful city of creative freedom, or has that image become another form of nostalgia?

I think people in Berlin are still striving for creative freedom. It is also true that gentrification plays a role in flattening the cultural offer. If you have to work two jobs to pay your rent, the time for artistic production is very limited, so people incline to do what is being done. Also, art that has subvention, the need to fill big houses, sell tickets, be visible on massive scale pushes for gigantism. So yes, I think Berlin is compromised in its cultural offer, because Berlin had a big underground heart, and the underground is no longer.

 How do you care for your performers in the process of creating such physically and emotionally demanding work?

Care is carried by everyone behind the tables – me, the entire creative team and our assistants – and on the sides of the stage: the costume, mask and props departments and the technicians. From my side, I see that everyone is okay with what they do

What do you hope the audience carries away from Goodbye Berlin – a feeling, a question, a memory?

I want to hope that the audience reflects on our current situation – that our freedoms are in danger, not because of an outside enemy, but mostly from the Western civilisation collapsing and the hate speech that comes from fear. I hope they get out feeling “the love” for this city, because I do love this place that is my home with all its cruelty, occasional kindness, rough beauty and the leftist spirit. I believe Berliners can still turn around the dangerous wave that is coming at us (and within us).

*Days later, her words still echo within me — the kind of statement that doesn’t end with a curtain call. Maybe Goodbye Berlin isn’t about Berlin at all. Maybe it’s about the myth of movement itself — the way our societies keep dancing faster to avoid stillness, to avoid seeing how little has changed. Macras’ choreography turns exhaustion into testimony: a portrait of a world addicted to its own acceleration, mistaking motion for meaning.

We like to believe we’ve evolved beyond the follies of the Weimar era — beyond the decadence, denial, and dissonance that came before collapse. But standing in front of Goodbye Berlin, one begins to wonder if progress was ever the point. And yet, there’s a strange beauty in the persistence. In the bodies that keep moving, not to escape, but to endure. Maybe that’s all that’s left to us: the quiet rebellion of staying awake, of paying attention, of refusing to perform the lie that things are fine. If the future is indeed a loop, then Goodbye Berlin is its mirror — unsettling, luminous, and painfully honest about what it costs to keep dancing.

Premiere: 30 October 2025, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz