Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

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Satoko Ichihara
Lena Brasch
Wallace Ferreira, Davi Pontes
The collage shows a design for the Volksbad by Florentina Holzinger

Premieres

2026/27

  • Aug 7 – Oct 1, 2026

    VOLKSBAD AM ROSA-LUXEMBURG-PLATZ

    Kicking off the new season under the theatre’s new artistic direction, the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz transforms into the VOLKSBAD AM ROSA-LUXEMBURG-PLATZ for eight weeks. No stage, no podium – instead a public swimming pool is mounted complete with fries stall and all. The street in front of the entrance will be turned into a 25-metre long swim lane. Right in the heart of Mitte, against the backdrop of the building’s monumental, socialist-classical architecture, the VOLKSBAD will be open for anyone who wants to come: students, pensioners, neighbours, water lovers and theatre fans. It’s free and no ID is required. There will be swimming lessons for the kids, bathing days reserved for diverse communities, and an outreach and discussion programme to make the place a space for public gatherings. 

    Berlin is a city of tenants, of newcomers and in-migrants, of people who do not hold a German passport and inhabitants without the right to vote and have a say – and it is a city, where public infrastructure has been systematically cut back over the last decades. In this context, the VOLKSBAD is a programmatic statement of intent and a warm welcoming “Hello” sent out into the neighbourhood by the new artistic direction. Florentina Holzinger and her team have announced their arrival to mark the end of the swimming season at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and the start of the first season. Their production Ophelia’s Got Talent, featuring performers swimming inside the Volksbühne, provided the inspiration for the VOLKSBAD. Now they are preparing a new beginning in front of the building.

    Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

  • World premiere

    Oct 1, 2026

    House of Hopes

    Rimini Protokoll: Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel

    It’s October 7, 1989: The 40th anniversary of the GDR is celebrated with a military parade on Karl-Marx-Allee. Meanwhile, representatives of all the theatres in East Berlin are gathering at the side foyer of the Volksbühne. A month later, this gathering has grown into one of the largest demonstrations in the history of Germany, bringing together almost one million people.

    Hopes for more participation and economic independence are certainly not only palpable in Berlin at the end of the 1980s. The last Soviet troops are pulling out of Afghanistan. In China, tens of thousands of students are taking to the streets. In Namibia, the country’s first free elections are being held. And in South Korea, the process of coming to terms with 26 years of military dictatorship has just begun. Across the globe, there is a new sense of hope that majorities could have the power to make their governments see reason. Greater freedom of movement and speech, but also wider political participation, seems within reach.

    House of Hopes invites audiences on a tour in search of this pioneering spirit, a tour which starts in the box-office foyer and leads via staircases and foyers through the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz bringing us into present days. The building’s architecture is the setting for ten autobiographical accounts from countries across the globe. These stories are full of hope, telling of the Esperanza during the campaign against the Pinochet dictatorship, the Speranță for freedom following the execution of the Ceaușescus, recalling the Nadzieja of the trade union movement in Poland, and expressing Omid for a less cruel Iranian state after the death of Khamenei.

    House of Hopes extends the lines of watershed moments in 1989 forward into the present – into a time when the unifying power of hope is both in high demand and up for debate: Should we wait and see while we hope, or should we make things happen?

    A co-production of Rimini Protokoll and Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

    Across the house

    With: Ani, Till Gedack, Nataly Jung-Hwa Han, Vera Jonas, Israel Kaunatjike, Joanna Kusiak, Corey Scott-Gilbert, Sir Henry, Verónica Troncoso, Homan Wesa

    Concept, Direction: Rimini Protokoll (Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel)
    Stage Design, Costume Design: Lili Anschütz
    Dramaturgy: Juliane Männel, Aljoscha Begrich
    Dramaturgy Volksbühne: Johanna Höhmann
    Video Design: Grit Schuster
    Music, Sound Design: Nikolas Neecke

  • World premiere

    Oct 2, 2026

    Perfection

    Based on the novel by Vincenzo Latronico

    Anta Recke

    The fall of the Berlin Wall saw Prenzlauer Berg and the neighbouring district of Berlin-Mitte come under the pressure of gentrification early on. Urban open spaces and vacant lots steeped in history turned into pop-up galleries, party venues and inexpensive living spaces that would soon be replaced by a generic architecture, neatly painted façades and objects of speculation. Back then, Berlin was an exciting, dynamic spot and, for a few years, the city where it all happened.

    “Everything was different, and that was exactly what they wanted; and yet, in some way, everything was the same. That was what they wanted, too.” The story of Anna and Tom, the protagonists of Vincenzo Latronico’s Booker Prize-nominated novel Perfection, begins in Berlin in the early 2000s. They arrive from southern Europe to escape the narrowness of their homeland. Attracted by digitally generated designs promising self-fulfilment and an idealised form of contemporaneity, they have to realise that these images evaporate as soon as they begin to come true. Soon, the city is felt to be a place of loneliness and lostness. Liberty and personal fulfilment seem within reach. At the same time, the protagonists are finding themselves cut off from any meaningful connection between the individual, the world and history.

    Three years after Anna and Tom, in 2007, Munich-born director Anta Recke also chose to move to Berlin and complete school education there. For Perfection, Recke has collaborated with set designer and visual artist Marta Dyachenko to create an arena with ever-shifting perspectives for the spectators. And much like those carefully curated Instagram realities, the lines between past, present and future, and between East and West Berlin, are increasingly blurred. The audience find themselves involved in a process of overwriting history.

    Prater

    With: Inga Busch, Marie Goyette, Benjamin Radjaipour, Damian Rebgetz, Joyce Sanhá

    Direction: Anta Recke
    Set Design: Marta Dyachenko
    Costume Design: Pola Kardum, Anta Recke
    Music: Ted Gaier
    Dramaturgy: Christoph Gurk, Leonie Jenning

  • Oct 3, 2026

    Mononoke

    Satoko Ichihara

    Mononoke. It’s the Japanese name given to spirits that take up residence in people and implant curses. Takako, an ironmongery saleswoman, has been afflicted by one of those. She sells iron kettles made with centuries-old Japanese craftsmanship. In the evenings, she puts an iron egg in her tea water. After finishing her tea, she has sex with the egg, still warm from the hot water. And although this feels good, Takako has an uneasy sense that something is wrong. A fortune-teller reveals what is tormenting her. She is haunted by a curse cast on her when her father disappeared at the time she got her first period. What follows is Takako’s attempt to free herself from everything that was thrust upon her without her consent. It’s the start of a surreal heroine’s journey through a world populated by gods, dolls, and hardware, by ancient myths and endless sales pitches.

    The Japanese author and director Satoko Ichihara is one of the leading voices of a new, feminist generation of theatre makers. In 2020, she won the Kishida Kunio Drama Award, Japan’s most prestigious theatre prize. With a sharp, unerring eye, she dissects the mundane and monstrous impositions of everyday life, focusing on bodies that claim their ground in a world that both shapes and exploits bodies to cast them away.

    Ichiara invited Berlin-based South Korean artist Mire Lee to create the set design for her first production at a theatre in Germany. Lee’s lifelike sculptures are usually showcased in museums. In team with costume designer Belle Santos, Ichihara draws on traditional Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre to create a modern-day interpretation of bodies fused with puppets, flesh growing from iron, and gods you’d better not anger.

    Main stage

    With: Gro Swantje Kohlhof, Rosa Lembeck, Julia Riedler, River Roux,
    Youka Snell (live music), Gwentsche Kollewijn (puppet theatre), Akira Schroth (puppet theatre), Maria Vittoria Zinoni (puppet theatre)

    Text, Direction: Satoko Ichihara
    Translation: Otone Sato
    Stage Design: Mire Lee
    Costume Design: Belle Santos
    Live Music: Youka Snell
    Dramaturgy: Helena Eckert

  • Oct 29, 2026

    New Creation (working title)

    Wallace Ferreira, Davi Pontes

    How can dance be developed into a practice of self-defense? Is it possible to make violence visible without re-enacting the dynamics of violence? How does each body develop its own capacity for self-defense? With their Repertório trilogy, the Rio de Janeiro-based choreographers Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira delivered a response to the rise of the far right in the country. At the end of October 2026, shortly after the next presidential election in Brazil, Pontes and Ferreira will premiere at the Volksbühne with a new production, for the first time outside Brazil.

    Together with six performers from Berlin, across Europe, and Brazil, Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira expand the practice they have been developing since 2018. Working alongside performers with different experiences, needs, and modes of stage presence, their choreography of self-defense takes on a new form. New Creation (working title) confronts racist violence, unafraid and without a melancholic note. Questioning the historical conditions of colonization and white supremacy, their choreography of self-defense opens up an ethical and political space for experimenting with embodied forms of resistance. Pontes and Ferreira work with poses, gestures, and collective actions informed by contemporary political theory. Elements of funk and ballroom emerge, only to be disrupted and reconfigured. Powerful movements are punctuated by moments of divergence, pauses, and playful gestures. Humour and irreverence serve as strategies for drawing the audience into a space of shared responsibility. In Celeste Burlina’s scenography, the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz transforms into the site of a choreographic experiment.

    Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation


    Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media

    Main stage

    With: Sebastião Abreu, Koko Yeji Boanyah, Wallace Ferreira, Gavin Law,
    Mai Júli Machado, Davi Pontes, Rayne, Galina Rodríguez 

    Concept, Choreography, Costume Design: Davi Pontes, Wallace Ferreira
    Stage Design: Celeste Burlina
    Sound: Podeserdesligado
    Dramaturgy: Tarun Kade
    Outside Eye: Marlene Monteiro Freitas
    Associate Production, International Distribution: Something Great

  • Oct 29 – Nov 1, 2026

    The School of Self-Defense

    Violence often begins before it is fully apparent. It starts with how you’re looked at, with words, labels and attributions, with being made to feel like you didn’t belong or weren’t represented; and even memory and remembering can be a form of violence. If violence comes in so many ways, then self-defense must also have a wider spectrum. The School of Self-Defense invites us to rethink self-defense as both a reaction to violence and a practice that can be shared: through the body, in space, and through collective action.

    Starting points are artistic practices pioneered by Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira, two artists from Rio de Janeiro whose work explores how violence is inscribed in the body and how your own body and movement choreography can be used in response as an act of resistance. The School expands this practice further, bringing it into a collective space where it can be shared, disseminated, and explored from other perspectives. With its clear focus on participation and codetermination, The School of Self-Defense is conceived as an ongoing series of workshops, discussions, performances, ballroom and dance events, and other collective formats. Artists, thinkers, and communities from Berlin, Brazil, and beyond will come together to exchange ideas and contribute to the production of new forms of knowledge. 

    In the discussion-based formats, theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva will analyse the global links between racialization and violence. Talk sessions with dance theorists, among them André Lepecki, seek to open up a perspective on performance as political space.

    A Major Ball held on the main stage will connect international with local scenes.
    In various categories such as Runway, Performance, and Realness, they showcase how identity, belonging, and presence are actively created. A Kiki Ball at the Prater venue will focus on young talents and local communities. New voices looking to make themselves heard and seen are particularly welcome, as well as all those who simply want to test their skills.

    The weekend-long event is rounded off with workshops, lectures, and conversations with international artists and intellectuals: Brazilian artist Puma Camillê’s approach combines capoeira and voguing to develop body strategies that straddle martial arts and performance. Ana Pi, also from Brazil, works with the body, with memory and diasporic narratives to explore how history has inscribed itself in the body. The artist and researcher Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro investigates corporality, spirituality, and resistance as forms of cultural self-assertion.

    Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation


    Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media

    Main stage, Prater

    Curated by: Davi Pontes, Wallace Ferreira, Marlene Engel
    In collaboration with: Sophie Yukiko

  • Berlin premiere

    Nov 6, 2026

    Der Teich (The Pond)

    Based on a short story by Robert Walser
    Gisèle Vienne

    What drives a child to extremes? In Robert Walser’s short drama, Der Teich (The Pond), the haunting story unfolds of a boy who does not feel loved by his family. At the height of despair, he fakes his own suicide. Blurring the lines between monologue and dialogue, the author zooms into the boy’s mind and shows how the self is disintegrating in a riot of emotions.

    The award-winning actors Adèle Haenel and Julie Shanahan will team up with eight dolls to stage a psychoactive chamber drama about power dynamics and agonising family structures, in a production by theatre artist Gisèle Vienne. Lighting designer Yves Godin and the musicians Stephen O’Malley – frontman of the legendary doom metal band Sunn O))) – and François Bonnet have created a trance-like light and sound environment for Vienne’s piece. The Pond is a choreography into the darkest depths of the soul and a captivating journey.

    Since 1999, Gisèle Vienne has been exploring subjects that touch upon social taboos in her choreographic and theatre works. Her productions such as Kindertotenlieder and the party-in-slow-motion choreography CROWD are defining works in recent dance history. In 2024, exhibitions at Haus am Waldsee and Georg Kolbe Museum showcased the disturbingly lifelike puppets that are characteristic of Vienne’s work. This year, the Franco-Austrian artist, who studied philosophy, music and puppeteering, will present her work based on the literary text Der Teich in Berlin for the first time. Her debut production at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz is scheduled for the 2028/2029 season.

    Main stage

    With: Adèle Haenel, Julie Shanahan

    Concept, Staging, Stage Design, Dramaturgy: Gisèle Vienne
    Lighting Design: Yves Godin
    Sound: Adrien Michel
    Music Direction: Stephen F. O’Malley
    Original Music: Stephen F. O’Malley, François J. Bonnet

    A production by DACM / Company Gisèle Vienne

  • Nov 25, 2026

    ALLES GLÜCK DER WELT

    Lena Brasch

    A musical comedy based on a story by Thomas Brasch and George Stamkoski

    Collaboration: Martin Walz
    Featuring 11 song texts by Thomas Brasch

    In Thomas Brasch’s previously unpublished comedy screenplay Alles Glück der Welt, the East German poet and writer imagines a future in 1985 that feels strangely familiar in today’s world. Full of humour, he depicts a society after the fall of the Berlin Wall in which the Nazi past has not been dealt with but continues to exert its influence. Although the political division of Germany into East and West has formally come to an end, it persists in people‘s minds, bodies, and relationships.  A new war seems imminent. People wear gloves, and there is widespread fear of an epidemic – of anything that might be contagious. Intimacy feels like an imposition. Freedom only exists in the form of collective isolation.

    The year is 1999, and Berlin is located at the seaside. After attending a US military boarding school, Robert Küssler, son of an arms manufacturer, returns home. His unexpected arrival rocks the family's world. Will he be able and willing to carry on the family business as tradition dictates? The family crisis is a lens through which societal conditions are magnified, offering a glimpse inside bourgeois structures and ideas of emancipation that are shaped by economic interests and ideological continuities. The songs, written by Brasch in the spirit of punk, draw on the traditions of music theater from the 1920s.

    Lena Brasch was born in Berlin in 1993. She is a writer and director, and the niece of Thomas Brasch. Having close access to her uncle‘s unpublished screenplay, she decided to revisit her family history and examine the film script from a contemporary perspective. Her own work navigates between literature, pop culture and political analysis. She likes to fuse her biographical entanglements and contemporary discourses to develop a new form of theatre that does not attempt to reconstruct the past, but reimagines it as part of the present to reveal the future as an open field, transcending traditional narratives.

    Main stage

    With: Kathrin Angerer, Jasna Fritzi Bauer, Andreas Döhler, Till Gedack,
    Gro Swantje Kohlhof, Rosa Lembeck, Fee Aviv Dubois     (live music), Izzy Ment (live music)

    Direction: Lena Brasch
    Stage Design: studio dietrich&winter
    Music Composition: Paul Eisenach, Wenzel Krah
    Costume Design: Eleonore Carrière
    Dramaturgy: Leonie Jenning

  • Dec 10, 2026

    CURSED – a preinvented world

    OMSK Social Club

    CURSED – a preinvented world is bent on trying our imagination. It starts as an open experimental setup, with people moving through a space that lacks the clear boundaries between stage and auditorium. Groups may form and disband. A live commentator keeps us updated about what’s happening, like a sports broadcast. Chatting turns into hearsay; hearsay into a collective state; collective states into new versions of reality. 

    The world of CURSED resembles a city where everyone is desperately trying to be someone else. Tourists strive to act like locals. A waste management unit keeps things running, as if the next shift could halt social decay. Amid the crowd are the so-called Oblivion-Infected – people who buck social rules but are under observation regardless. Groups of people start imitating each other. Behaviour patterns are spreading through the room, like trends, rumours, memes. No one can say for sure whether this is still real life or a next-level version of reality being produced.

    The Berlin-based international artists collective OMSK Social Club develop performative role-playing formats known as “Real Game Play (RGP).” There is no fixed script or linear plot like in traditional drama. Instead, a social arrangement, a system of rules, situations and changing constellations are created in a live setting – and recreated differently with the next performance. The participants are not fully fictional characters, because their own individual traits, social dynamics in the room and the choices people make, all add up to slowly impact on the game until they take the lead.

    CURSED unfolds over the course of ten performances as an ongoing narrative. The work – which also marks the collective’s first production for the theatre stage – centres around a public trial, a public process. CURSED – a preinvented world explores what it means for societies to rate, comment, and dissect ideas straight away, before they can even take shape. What happens when you’re no longer able to tell whether you’re just watching – or whether you're already playing the game?

    Prater

    Artistic Direction: OMSK Social Club
    Music: LABOUR
    Audio Consulting: Alf Brooks
    Stage Design: Daryan Knoblauch
    Core Nodes: Stella Horta
    Dramaturgy: Marlene Engel

  • Volksbühne premiere

    Dec 19, 2026

    Fräulein Else

    freely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler

    Leonie Böhm, Julia Riedler

    A letter from Vienna, an impossible request, a decision that isn’t one, and a young woman, who is beginning to realise what the world expects from her. Leonie Böhm and Julia Riedler bring Arthur Schnitzler’s Else into the present. Published in 1924, the novella has lost none of its sharp wit and is, even a century later, a brilliant study in the abuse of power. Julia Riedler, who will be joining the ensemble of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in the new season, brings this exceptional play and her commanding performance to Berlin.

    An urgent letter from Vienna ruins Else’s vacation. Her mother is desperate as her father is deeply in debt – yet again. Now, 30,000 guilders are needed, and quickly. Else is asked to approach the wealthy art dealer Dorsday to beg for money and prevent her father from going to jail. Dorsday – older, wealthier, and fully aware of his position of power – is willing to help. Under one condition: Else must allow him to gaze at her naked body for an entire quarter of an hour.

    Schnitzler wrote the story in the form of a seamless stream of consciousness from the point of view of a young woman who’s beginning to realise in real time just what is happening to her. Leonie Böhm and Julia Riedler have joined forces to adapt this interior monologue for the stage and developed it for the present. The result is a dazzling solo performance of extraordinary intimacy that resonates just as powerfully today with the critical questions Else has for society as it did a century ago. For what Else experienced back then is still happening today.

    Julia Riedler and Leonie Böhm’s Fräulein Else is one of the most critically-acclaimed productions currently showing in German-language theatres. Julia Riedler was voted Actress of the Year 2025 for her role as Else, and Leonie Böhm received the award for Best Director. The production won the Nestroy Prize, was invited to the 2026 Berlin Theatre Festival, and is also shown in Vienna, Cologne, and Munich.

    Main stage

    With: Julia Riedler

    Concept: Leonie Böhm, Julia Riedler
    Direction: Leonie Böhm
    Stage and Costume Design: Belle Santos
    Dramaturgy: Matthias Seier
    Outside Eye: Helena Eckert

    A production by Volkstheater Wien

  • Jan 21, 2027

    A Production by

    Christopher Rüping

    Christopher Rüping will make his debut at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in January 2027 with a new production. Rüping’s 10-hour spectacle Dionysos Stadt and his takes on Hamlet and Trommeln in der Nacht at Münchner Kammerspiele, then led by Matthias Lilienthal, played a decisive role in shaping the artistic vision of the house. His productions combine emotional depth with insightful analyses of the present, transforming complex stuff into powerful, immersive live experiences. Over the past few years, he has increasingly turned his attention to opera and music theatre. In the coming years, he will direct regularly at Volksbühne, bringing with him a number of actors with whom he has long-standing artistic ties.

    Main stage

  • February 2027

    A Production by

    Toshiki Okada

    The Japanese theatre director Toshiki Okada is well known for his sharp-witted, humorous plays, in which he takes a close look at the social issues facing contemporary Japanese society. In his productions, the performers on stage develop a uniquely fascinating repertoire of movement, while the characters’ conversations revolve around the both mundane and existential details of coping with everyday life. Okada made his international breakthrough in 2004 with the production Five Days in March. The piece centred on a ‘lost generation’ of Japanese youth facing a future that offers no hope. More than twenty years later, his first production at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz will again be dealing with private fears and political despair: If you can’t make ends meet, you have to die young.

    Main stage

  • February/March 2027

    Die Reise ans Ende der Komödie oder: Wer zuletzt lacht, lebt am längsten (working title)

    RambaZamba Theater, Milan Peschel

    Since 1992, RambaZamba Theater has existed, bringing together professional actors with and without disabilities on stage. Now the freshly renovated Prater is proud to host the inclusive RambaZamba Theater for the first time, in a production directed by Milan Peschel. Milan Peschel is an actor, writer, musician, painter, director and a very gifted comedian. His career kicked off at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. His credits include numerous films and TV series, among them are Die Känguru-Chroniken and Doppelhaushälfte.

    Die Reise ans Ende der Komödie oder: Wer zuletzt lacht, lebt am längsten (working title) is his third collaboration with the RambaZamba Theater. The story is about trying to make the impossible possible, and about filming a movie whose story is so incredible that it is considered unfilmable. The theatre pros from RambaZamba Theater are, however, quite used to accomplishing even the most impossible task with flying colours and exhilaration. The audience is witness to how a committed community, amid ruthless outbreaks of violence, injustice and other criminal acts, conspires to make clever use of a theatrical coup that spreads fear and terror among the neoliberal guardians of the status quo.

    Prater

  • Mar 19, 2027

    A Production by

    Leonie Böhm

    Director Leonie Böhm collaborates closely with actors to develop her productions. She initially focused on works from the classical canon – such as Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, Schiller’s The Robbers and Goethe’s Faust – which she and her ensemble reimagined in radically deconstructive ways. Since then, she has expanded upon this practice to include contemporary texts. She worked with Kim de l’Horizon to make their Blutbuch transform into Blutstück. Currently, her adaptation of Lucas Rijneveld’s novel My heavenly favourite / Mein kleines Prachttier is shown in Munich, and she has plans to take to the stage herself in one of her next productions. The trained visual artist, art teacher and mediator likes to venture into unchartered territory. The attitude inherent in her approach is both radically vulnerable and challenging.  In her first production at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, she returns to working with Julia Riedler, the protagonist and co-author of their piece Fräulein Else (also currently showing at the Volksbühne).

    Main stage

  • Apr 22, 2027

    Blimund (working title)

    Marlene Monteiro Freitas

    Marlene Monteiro Freitas was born in Sal and grew up in São Vicente, two islands of the Cape Verdean archipelago. Alongside Florentina Holzinger, she serves on the artistic advisory board of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, under the artistic direction of Matthias Lilienthal. Over more than two decades, her work for the stage has carved out an unmistakable territory – one defined by impurity, heterogeneity, hybridity, intensity and openness – and has earned her recognition across the international performing arts landscape.

    Her pieces build their own form of narrative: not through characters and plot, but through rhythm, figures and situations. Music is not backdrop but architecture. What emerges is less a composition than a friction – between different ideas, worlds and logics, rubbed against one another until something catches light. Contradictions are not resolved but held in contact, generating heat, texture, residue.

    For her first creation at the Volksbühne, Freitas turns to Blimund – a Cape Verdean folk tale threaded through with violence, inequality, sacrifice and the longing for freedom and love. At its heart is an ox, a figure that echoes across myths and stories from cultures around the world, carrying within it something ancient and unresolved.

    But for Freitas, a myth is never a story to be retold. It is a surface to press against – a starting point from which she works associatively and vertiginously, placing foreign ideas and worlds in close, charged contact. The result is a stage universe entirely her own: precise, hypnotic, and intense.

    Main stage

  • May 27, 2027

    Bop House (working title)

    Kurdwin Ayub

    Moon and Sun, the feature films by Kurdish-Austrian filmmaker, screenwriter and performance artist Kurdwin Ayub, focus on broken families, the Western gaze on Muslim life, on young women and patriarchy. The storytelling is so close to our current reality that at times the films almost seem like documentaries. At the same time, the chances and constraints of the internet and social media play an important role in her work. In her early video pieces — shorts in the style of YouTube clips – Ayub performs directly to camera in seemingly private settings, dauntlessly playing with expectations, social roles and gender stereotypes. Her new production at the Volksbühne is set in a shared house inhabited by content creators. Inspired by a real-life Bop House, it is about a group of influencers settled there to produce content for the erotic social-media platform OnlyFans. “Bop” is a slang term generally used in a derogatory way for people – especially women – who have multiple sex partners. The women of the Bop House have reclaimed this insult as a form of empowerment. And, naturally, they use it as a form of provocation – and to make money.

    In her second work for the stage, Ayub sets out to explore group dynamics, the performative quality of social media, and how reality and self-staging tend to get blurred in ways that are uncomfortable for everyone involved.

    Main stage

  • June 2027

    2009 (working title)

    Ásrún Magnúsdóttir, Alexander Roberts

    On 1 January 2026, Germany’s Military Service Modernization Act came into force. Since then, upon turning 18, every individual receives a questionnaire for his or her birthday, designed to assess their willingness, skills, and suitability for military service. As many other countries, Germany is rearming in response to what appears to be an increasingly unstable global security situation. Young people today are directly confronted with the question: What would it mean to go to war? And what would it mean to go to war for Germany? Ásrún Magnúsdóttir and Alexander Roberts, the creators of Teenage Songbook of Love and Sex, in which a group of young people sang songs of love, longing and loneliness, curiosity and self-doubt, focus on today’s 18-year-olds in their new production, exploring contradictions and the political dimensions of personal experiences. 2009 is part DJ set, part live concert, and part dance party, hosted by Berliners born in 2009 – a new army, potentially.

    Main stage

Ensemble and Guests

  • Joyce Sanhá

  • River Roux

  • Damian Rebgetz

  • Corey Scott-Gilbert

  • Benjamin Radjaipour

  • Kathrin Angerer

  • Gro Swantje Kohlhof

  • Sir Henry

  • Till Gedack

  • Martin Wuttke

  • Julia Riedler

  • Rosa Lembeck

  • Sophie Rois

Guests New Productions

  • Sebastião Abreu
  • Ani
  • Jasna Fritzi Bauer
  • Koko Yeji Boanyah
  • Jonas Dassler
  • Andreas Döhler
  • Fee Aviv Dubois
  • Wallace Ferreira
  • Adèle Haenel
  • Vera Jónás
  • Israel Kaunatjike
  • Joanna Kusiak
  • Gavin Law
  • Mai-Júli Machado
  • Nataly Jung-Hwa Han
  • Davi Pontes
  • Rayne
  • Galina Rodríguez
  • Julie Shanahan
  • Youka Snell
  • Verónica Troncoso
  • Homan Wesa
  • Julia Windischbauer

Series and Projects

  • 20 Minuten

    Helena Eckert

    Once a quarter, the Volksbühne invites Berlin-based artists onto the stage of the Roter Salon to spend a long night exploring, through their own artistic practice, the mother of all interdisciplinary formats: the lecture performance. A form that has been circulating between disciplines since the 1960s, placing the art of storytelling at its heart and infiltrating both the theatre and the lecture hall in equal measure. It has long since become a genre in its own right. The experimental setup is therefore as simple as it is open: lecture performance, 20 minutes.

  • Als gäbe es morgen

    Abdalrahman Alqalaq, Katharine Halls, Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus

    An evening of readings and conversation addressing potential futures between the river and the sea, curated by Abdalrahman Alqalaq, Katharine Halls and Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus. A series of literary events in which each episode stands on its own.

  • ANALYSIS (working title)

    Henrike Kohpeiß, Lama El Khatib

    ANALYSIS (working title) is a programme for collective political education brought together by writer and cultural worker Lama El Khatib and Philosopher Henrike Kohpeiß. Through a cluster of interconnected events – including collective study groups, film screenings and artistic interventions amongst other formats – the programme will address contemporary political urgencies in their social, aesthetic, affective, and discursive dimensions.

    The first cycle unfolds around the global intensification of military infrastructures and technologies. Bringing together researchers, antiwar activists, and historical texts to analyse the political economy of war and international resistance to it. The second cycle takes Peter Weiss’ Aesthetics of Resistance as a point of departure to question the relationship between politics and aesthetics in the past and present. What role can art – and the artist – play in today’s reality?

  • Bailables Vol. 1 – 6

    Club de Baile transforms the Roter Salon into a space for Latin American music, dance, performance and celebration. Across six evenings, Bailables Vol. 1–6 brings concerts, DJs, dance competitions and experimental works from Berlin’s Latin American diaspora into Volksbühne.

  • Berlin Review x Volksbühne: Fire From All Sides

    Tobias Haberkorn

    The world has become a hotter place – not only politically, militarily, and climatically, but also in the realm of ideas. Whether it is still possible to speak and think freely and precisely in Berlin – and if so, about what – is the question Berlin Review: Magazine for Books and Ideas has pursued since its launch in February 2024. In this talk series, editor Tobias Haberkorn takes up the pressing issues of our time with authors, friends, and adversaries of the magazine.

  • Delfi Magazin Release

    The release events of Delfi Magazine bring together writers, artists, and guests for readings, conversations, and live formats accompanying each new issue. At their core are changing themes, literary texts, collective readings, and public discussions that explore the intersections of contemporary literature, pop culture, politics, and performance.

  • Demo Tape

    Fatima Çalışkan, Martin Kaluza

    Every era has its own struggles, and every protest movement its own songs. They often recall forgotten revolutions and labour strikes. Expect more shows in this series created by Fatima Çalışkan and Martin Kaluza next season, in its original form: Two hosts, one guest, a screen, a piano, and an audience who appreciates a nice sing-along – welcome to Demo Tape, the political song salon!

  • don’t eat theory

    Ayşegül, Valentin

    The state of the left is somewhat paradoxical. On the one hand, everyone decries the lack of debate, while on the other, hardly anyone is willing to take the risk of engaging with others. It is always the same experts sitting on the same panels, offering the same old opinions. But no one gets up to bang on the table and smash it to pieces.

    Ayşegül and Valentin, the hosts of the Don’t Read Theory podcast, are bent on bringing the spirit of lively debate back to the Volksbühne. The desire for real encounters and dialogue should no longer be limited to just a few. We all have to go through this together. The aim is to create a shared space where we can overcome invisible mental walls and also learn to embrace a clueless moment. And what better way to do that than around a generously set table? So let’s be part of the gentrification process for a night out at the Roter Salon-turned-small-plates-restaurant – just what you’d expect in Berlin-Mitte, isn’t it?

  • HIDDEN AGENDA

    Sunday Talk with Jean Peters / CORRECTIV

    How can we combat the authoritarian backlash? On the first Sunday of every month, journalist Jean Peters from CORRECTIV media house, invites people who should know best: strategists from campaign teams, from social movements, political parties and policymakers – and those who are not just involved in planning democratic resistance, but have first-hand experience: Tips, tricks and fails preparing us to get ready for whatever may come.

  • Low Signal

    Mira Mann, Isabel Lewis

    Low Signal explores the tensions and resonances between poetry, choreography, and music. For each episode [or live transmission], Isabel Lewis and Mira Mann invite poets, choreographers, and musicians to enter the space with fragments, sketches, scores, moods, rehearsals, conversations, or partially formed ideas. The series approaches poetry not as a universal language, but as a social and material condition: something spoken, sounded, gestured, interrupted, misheard, repeated, withheld, or collectively carried.

    Moving between concert, reading, rehearsal, and happening, the series explores how bodies, voices, and music organise relations between people – and how they sometimes fail to. It lingers in the space between shared rhythm and private drift, sensual immersion and conceptual friction.

  • MEDUSA – Contemporary Playwriting and Inclusive Identities in Europe

    Festival of International Playwriting 2026

    Kombinat e. V., Drama Panorama

    The Berlin mini-festival is part of the project MEDUSA – Contemporary Playwriting and Inclusive Identities in Europe and presents a selection of six theatre plays from Germany, Bulgaria and Italy to audiences through staged readings, public talks with the authors and translators, and a panel discussion.

    MEDUSA – Contemporary Playwriting and Inclusive Identities in Europe is a project bringing together six partner institutions from Italy, Bulgaria and Germany. Overall coordination is handled by the Berlin-based transcultural organization Kombinat e. V., dedicated to promoting inclusive and critical artistic practices. For the MEDUSA project, Kombinat has partnered with Drama Panorama: Forum für Übersetzung und Theater e. V.

  • Read the Room: Buch am Mittwoch

    Books under constitutional protection, books on TikTok, books in the age of AI – authors in their writing rooms, out and about with their finger on the pulse, a readership in constant flux: What does authorship mean today? Our series, with a new title but a long tradition at the Volksbühne – once Nachtcafé, Lesezone, then Lesebühne, Literatur, and more recently Parole:Text – is entering its next round. Selected authors of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction present themselves at Roter Salon to launch their books, talk about their writing practices and meet their readers.

  • Revolution, Revolt, Uproar

    Film Programme at the Volksbühne

    We present films that engage with reality – cinema that takes a stand on the conflicts of our time, whether intentionally or not. The programme includes Berlin premieres and blockbusters, as well as rediscoveries from around the world that have sparked change in their countries of origin.

  • Reading List

    Theresia Enzensberger, Patrik Gräb

    In this new series, authors Theresia Enzensberger and Patrik Gräb will focus on well-known, lesser-known and international writers, who live and write in Berlin, but whose works are perhaps not readily familiar here. They will discuss selected texts and ask how other writers and their works have inspired the process of writing.

  • Sissy Smut

    Matt Lambert

    SISSY SMUT is a bold mix of cinematic art, performance, live concert, lecture, pornography, archive and nightlife. Initiated in collaboration with Matt Lambert, the format assembles artists, filmmakers, performers, musicians and other dear creatures, whose artistic practice defy fixed meanings, cultural pacification and the separation of politics and desire.

    Inspired by queer film art, censored images, disappearing spaces and the lived experience of community, SISSY SMUT seek to create a temporary space for frictions and pleasures, contradictions and recollections. They are not into issues of representation nor haunted by nostalgia for queer scenes of the past. Rather, they like to look at bodies under pressure and see glamour as a survival strategy; camp as a form of politics; sexuality as a language, as ritual and risk.

  • The Drama is Present

    Suhrkamp Theater

    The Drama is Present series continues into the next season as a collaboration between neighbours Suhrkamp Verlag and the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. The focus will be on new book releases from Suhrkamp Theater Verlag. Exciting new plays by contemporary playwrights will be presented as staged readings combined with film, live music, discussions, and performative acts.

  • TIKTOK KOLLOQUIUM

    Freya Hermann, Vera Klocke

    TIKTOK KOLLOQUIUM is hosted by Vera Klocke and Freya Herrmann, creators of the podcast Fashion The Gaze, who regularly invite guests to talk about the political impacts and implications of today’s social media (self-)presentations. Addressing issues such as the disciplining of the body, the politics of visibility, and neo-fascist videos on TikTok, they treat analyses of these (re)presentations as active acts of resistance and cultural critique in a time when far-right populism gets normalized. The live-recorded TIKTOK KOLLOQUIUM will be released as podcast after the show.

  • Vergessene Arbeitskämpfe – Ein Punkabend

    Belegschaft

    Punk has a place at the Volksbühne, and workers’ struggles have to return to the stage of the working wo*man’s theatre.

    In recent years, many subculturally vital spots and places have vanished from the map of Berlin-Mitte. Our response to this is a concert cycle at Roter Salon to re-establish old and new traditions. We are a core group of ten Volksbühne workers who, encouraged and supported by many of our colleagues, have been organising punk concerts at Roter Salon every other month since 2019.

    Each evening is dedicated to a labor struggle. These struggles span from the past to the present and cross international borders. Many of them have faded from public memory. We bring their stories back, recalling the anger, courage, and solidarity they embodied, and giving voice to what has too often gone unheard. The small, forgotten strikes find a place in the Red Salon where they can once again be seen, while punk bands take over a stage in the heart of the city.

  • Music Programme

    The music programme at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, led by Marlene Engel, presents sound-based and performative projects veering between live concert, club music, performance art and installation. 

    The programme’s focus is on settings, when established formats destabilise into more fluid forms. Drawing inspiration from Berlin’s vibrant international music and art scenes, it seeks to integrate the most diverse approaches: experimental composition, electronic music, pop and club culture, performance, dance and visual arts. Historical positions and pioneering trends, established icons and artists from more informal scenes in clubs or digital spaces all get their moment. What matters is not so much genre, but the role of sound in shaping perception, movement and social situations.

    This question holds special significance in and for Berlin. For decades, the city has been a central hub of contemporary club culture, blending subcultural styles, migration, nightlife, improvised music scenes with the most diverse forms of music. Now these spaces are either disappearing or coming under increasing economic pressure. All the more important are, in this context, places where these music trends are not merely archived or re-presented, but actually driven forward: as vital artistic practices with close links to contemporary art, performance and all facets of theatrical creativity. 

    Programmatic openness is key, but by no means a neutral task. Volksbühne encourages artistic practices that challenge existing orders and arrangements – whether aesthetic, social or technological – and focus on collaborative programming that incorporates diverse curatorial perspectives and external curators to resist traditional power dynamics in the selection process. Commissioned productions also play a vital part in strengthening ties and cooperation with artists across disciplines, often evolving in long-term processes. 

    At the same time, the programme does not follow a linear history of music, but traces invisible lines, unwritten scenes, and influences outside of any established canon. Many of the works programmed play the tension between (so-called) high culture and pop, club scene and institution, presence and reference, physical experience and digital circulation.

    A show may well begin in a focused, minimalist fashion and, hours later, end in collective overdrive. What remains is seldom a straightforward story, but rather the memory of intense moments, images, states and shapes, or rumours of subwoofers in the foyer, and, with any luck, stage fog filling the Roter Salon, and a voice that lingers.

  • P14

    P14, the youth theatre at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, has been in existence for over 30 years. It is not the brainchild of theatre managers, and it is not based on a fixed concept. P14 is constantly transforming with the young theatre makers who join in and get involved. It evolves with what they bring to the table, with what they want, what they need and what is on their minds.

    The idea is: what do you want to tell, and how? Not: how much experience do you have? The participants are the authors. They create their own theatre, both on stage and behind the scenes in a self-directed way, including writing, directing, filming and videography, costumes and stage design. The lines between artistic work and (self-)organisation are blurred, and the idea that one must be taught dramatic art before being allowed to practise it, is dispelled.

    This is the political essence of this theatre practice: P14 does not think of theatre as a ready-made form, but as a social process in which power relations, exclusion mechanisms and conflicts come to light in tangible ways, whilst remaining open to negotiation. P14-director Vanessa Unzalu Troya provides support and assistance throughout the artistic and creative processes with her expertise and insight, but without offering ready-made answers.

  • Gegenfunk Wedding

    Gegenfunk Wedding is a digital channel run by young people from Berlin’s Wedding and Moabit districts that concentrates on their thoughts and ideas – both on and off camera. The contributions reflect a broad range of perspectives and illustrate what the medially ubiquitous events of war mean for local young people’s daily lives.

    Wedding is changing: a recruitment centre is to open at Leopoldplatz; the Pierburg factory, a subsidiary of Rheinmetall, is in the process of switching its production from auto parts to weapons and ammunition; and Bundeswehr advertisements are everywhere, on kebab wrappers, in trams and in schools.

    The Gegenfunk makers have very different experiences with war and its consequences. Some have fled as refugees, while others come from families with refugee backgrounds. Still others hold German passports, yet find that their nationality is at issue. These youngsters are now forced to ask themselves: Would you kill for Germany?

    Gegenfunk Wedding regularly meet at the Berlin Anti-War Museum, one of the city’s oldest anti-militarist institutions, founded by Ernst Friedrich. The museum’s collection shows how early on children were moulded into future soldiers by state institutions. Playing at war is easier than playing peace games. 

    The anarchist and anti-militarist Gustav Landauer was one of the co-founders of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Rosa Luxemburg, who gave her name to the famous square, saw war as a manifestation of the willingness to submit due to economic and social power imbalances. Gegenfunk uses the history of the Volksbühne as a starting point to look at the wars of the present.

    In cooperation with Theater X in Moabit and MÄDEA in Gesundbrunnen, a variety of multimedia and performance-based formats are being developed: talk shows, street interviews, and reports, as well as screenprints, posters, and a mobile broadcast station to be set up in public spaces – for example, in front of the recruitment centre at Leopoldplatz.

    Gegenfunk Wedding is a local urban-space project of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz launching in autumn 2026.

Repertoire
Victory

Friends of Rosa

Individual membership 120 €
2-person membership 180 €
Students (up to 30 years of age), school students, volunteers, trainees, pensioners, unemployed persons (with basic income support; ALG II; social benefit recipients; severely disabled persons) 30 €
Corporate membership 400 €

Friends of Rosa is a new supporters’ group for the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Together, in a spirit of friendship yet not without some controversy, they set out in search of evidence and truths that can change life for the better. The Friends of Rosa are interested in progressive alliances and solidarity, in those moments that tip the balance or those fleeting glitches that alter the course of events. Just as on the stage which they love and support, the Friends believe that another world is possible.

Founded in February 2026, its goal is to support the Volksbühne and carry on its legacy: The theatre was built in the early 20th century with funding from a workers’ movement association, a ‚friendly society‘. And what was created by a joint effort, should also be carried forward through the combined forces of a circle of friends. 

Friends of Rosa invites interested parties and friends of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz to join this circle. Founders are Thomas Krüger together with Silke Eberhard, Ulrich Gold, Sabine Kendzia, Julia Roth, Rainer Rother, Franziska Sauerbrey, Bernd Scherer, André Schmitz, Stephan Schwarz, Adama Ulrich und Hortensia Völckers. The Friends support the Volksbühne in its artistic aspirations and provides input for events that encourage free and open debate on important social issues, offering a forum for exchanging ideas among friends. Every year, the circle of friends will embark on a trip to attend a special theatre production or festival. These trips focus on venues and events that resonate with the artistic programme of the Volksbühne, and will be accompanied by artistic director Matthias Lilienthal. 

Please send an email to the following address for more information:
friendsofrosa@volksbuehne-berlin.de

All membership fees are payable upon joining the club, and annually on 1 January.