TOWARDS:2026 is a cycle of intensive workshops that include physical praxis, evening lectures, video screenings, and live performances. It’s the metaphor of aiming at something – to expose and engage ourselves in physical investigations and conceptual challenges that can foster creativity and encourage discoveries. TOWARDS:2026 see pedagogy as a continuous intellectual provocation, an occasion for inspiration through paradoxes and awakenings and as a desire to overturn common sense and question what we have learned.
25.04
Welcome to All the Way Around, Saturday the 25 April at 18:00! A concept by Meg Stuart and Doug Weiss, performed in different contexts and settings all over the world, together with guest performers or as a candid duet.
In an intimate concert setting, choreographer and dancer Meg Stuart meets jazz musician Doug Weiss. Together, they go on an uncharted journey into movement and sound. All the Way Around starts with the ballad, a song of longing and defiance, and breaks it down into small but meaningful gestures. Tracing and unfurling spirals of memory, All the Way Around takes a deep dive into what was, riding the waves between the almost-remembered and the unknown.
Meg Stuart (US/BE/DE) is a choreographer, director and dancer who lives and works in Berlin and Brussels. With her company, Damaged Goods, founded in 1994, she has created over thirty productions, ranging from solos and duets to large-scale choreographies, videoworks, site-specific creations and improvisation projects. Recent creations include steal you for a moment (2024) and GLITCH WITCH (2024). Stuart’s work moves freely between the genres of dance, theater and visual arts, driven by an ongoing dialogue with artists from different disciplines. Through fictions and shifting narrative layers, she explores dance as a source of healing and a way to transform the social fabric. Improvisation is an important part of Stuart’s practice, as a strategy to move from physical and emotional states or the memory of them. She passes down her knowledge through regular workshops and master classes in- and outside of the studio. In 2025, with the support of Forum Dança, she organised a first edition of the ‘Mystery School’, an unconventional and experimental studies programme for performing artists. Stuart has directed and choreographed a range of video works, including a four-part series for Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s CC:World project, Shelf Life for Steirischer Herbst ’23, and, most recently Sulphur Edges — a 60-minute film created in collaboration with participants of the Mystery School for the Walk&Talk Biennale (São Miguel, Azores). These works explore the presence of the body in relation to space and landscape, reflecting her ongoing interest in the conditions and potentials of embodiment. Stuart has received several awards in recognition of her oeuvre, among which the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Biennale di Venezia in 2018 and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography. www.damagedgoods.be
Based in Berlin and New York, acoustic bassist Doug Weiss (US/DE) has held it down and helped it swing for 30 years. Since 1996 he has been bassist and musical director of The Al Foster quartet. He is a member of Brian Blade’s “Lifecycles” and “Fellowship” bands, the Peter Bernstein Quartet, and the Seamus Blake group. His band “The Berlin Quartet” features Weiss as a composer, arranger, and bandleader. Weiss is currently on Faculty of the New School University and SUNY Purchase College.