FESTIVAL PROGRAMME 2026
SHINE · MEG STUART / Opening
Meg Stuart is a choreographer, director, and artist living and working between Berlin and Brussels. Since founding her company Damaged Goods in 1994, she has developed an extensive body of work across performance, moving image, installation, and collaborative research. Her practice approaches the body as a sensitive terrain shaped by memory, sensation, imagination, and transformation. Improvisation, long-term artistic collaboration, and an ongoing exploration of presence and perception are central to her work.
Stuart’s moving-image works extend her choreographic thinking into film. The camera becomes a partner in tracing how bodies encounter architectures, landscapes, and transitional spaces. Moving between intimacy and exposure, presence and disappearance, the works explore how bodies are shaped by their surroundings while simultaneously transforming them.
For POOL SHINE 2026, POOL presents a selection of Meg Stuart’s moving-image works, offering different perspectives on her long-standing investigation into embodiment, space, perception, and the shifting boundaries between the real and the imagined. … more about Meg Stuart
DE
Meg Stuart ist Choreografin, Regisseurin und Künstlerin und lebt und arbeitet zwischen Berlin und Brüssel. Seit der Gründung ihrer Kompanie Damaged Goods im Jahr 1994 hat sie ein umfangreiches Werk entwickelt, das Performance, Bewegtbild, Installation und kollaborative Forschung umfasst. In ihrer künstlerischen Praxis begreift sie den Körper als sensibles Terrain, in dem Erinnerung, Wahrnehmung, Vorstellungskraft und Transformation zusammenkommen. Improvisation, langfristige künstlerische Zusammenarbeit sowie die fortwährende Auseinandersetzung mit Präsenz und Wahrnehmung sind zentrale Elemente ihrer Arbeit.
Stuarts Arbeiten mit bewegten Bildern führen ihr choreografisches Denken in den Film hinein. Die Kamera wird dabei zu einer choreografischen Partnerin und verfolgt, wie Körper auf Architekturen, Landschaften und Übergangsräume treffen. Zwischen Intimität und Exponiertheit, Präsenz und Verschwinden untersuchen die Arbeiten, wie Körper durch ihre Umgebung geprägt werden und diese zugleich verändern.
Für POOL SHINE 2026 präsentiert POOL eine Auswahl von Meg Stuarts Bewegtbildarbeiten, die unterschiedliche Perspektiven auf ihre langjährige Auseinandersetzung mit Körperlichkeit, Raum, Wahrnehmung und den sich verschiebenden Grenzen zwischen Realität und Imagination eröffnen. … mehr über Meg Stuart
SHINE · 09.09.
- INTERMISSION
Where were we a luminous white no place half moon desert half simulated ski holiday on an unknown planet MORE - WHAT HOLDS US
A group of people float in a body of water, clustering and dispersing into shifting constellations. Cut off from context, this fluid landscape has its own temporality … MORE - JAYSON (PORTRAIT)
In 2008, Meg Stuart created a one shot video, inspired by the face-to-face videos of Vito Acconci, in which she explored time capsules of compressed presence revolving around simple actions and relational axes. MORE - SULPHUR EDGES
Sulphur Edges is a choreographic encounter shaped with and through place. MORE - RIPPLES
In Ripples, we enter a world without angles or orientation: shallow water, beneath whose surface lies a disquieting stillness. MORE - BLADES
Set in a field of tall grasses, Blades captures the subtle movements of two women as they find shelter amid the stalks. MORE
With PEARLS, POOL continues across three evenings of curated film programmes, bringing together movement-based works that speak from different perspectives and artistic worlds. The selection invites encounters between distinct cinematic languages, experiences, and approaches.
PEARLS · 10.09.
- MNTCLVA – ECHO VOID
Wander and dance until you find your place beyond the ordinary. A journey through Berlin where you will experience the beauty over the struggle of living in a city. MORE - Noche [Gómez / Duarte]
Improvisation based Dance Video, part of a series. MORE - Thinking Vulnerability
In this space, vulnerability becomes both a revelation and a challenge. MORE - Dancing on architecture 1 : structure
Two performers whose bodies become the sole instrument for measuring, activating, and revealing space. MORE - 7cm from the Navel
If I am different everywhere I go, how many versions of me exist? And if I need to leave somewhere, do I need to leave some me behind? MORE - Inhale
A motionless woman, caught between life and death, appears in both domestic and global frames—through the passage of time and seasons, her quiet resistance to oppression is revealed. MORE - Portrait at 19
Filmed within the Finnish landscape, the work engages memory and presence through subtle frictions between language and place allowing meaning to emerge through attention, pause, and shared sensorial experience. MORE - Faultline
Geologic scale widens in the vast Mojave Desert as a lone dancer grips against steep rock faces in order to be held at high altitude. Racing to its edges that seem to have no end, his complex and momentous movement thwarts and hurdles over the spiny desert floor. MORE
PEARLS · 11.09.
- Effetá
A danced liturgy unfolds within sacred walls as silence breaks into breath, touch, and collective power. Effetá explores vulnerability, belonging, and the transformative strength of love. MORE - Forgive or Not to Forgive
Chang Yan and Chen Jun speak their childhood wounds through voice and body – one moves toward forgiveness, the other stays with refusal. MORE - Noche [Fizkal / Duarte]
Noche offers a participatory space—a container for the dialectical encounter of languages—from which a language of its own emerges. Noche undertakes a search to reclaim the poetic in art, positioning the body as an instrument of perception and a site for the generation of meaning. MORE - 틈 teum
When we enter old buildings, we dive into old histories. What the walls say to us doesn’t need to be translated because the feeling is stronger than words, and the chills in the skin show the energies that flow in space. MORE - Air De Temps
AIR DE TEMPS tells of an urgent need to speak out, to delve into lost dreams, to confront your demons and regurgitate your resentment – have a voice. MORE - Calipso
When the body stops resisting, the river becomes possibility … MORE - Where We Learn Our Worth
Based on the music of Robert Emms, this dance film is a visual poem exploring the relationship between humans, nature and urban architecture. MORE - NU!
A film exploring modern masculinity, brotherhood, shot across the streets, rooftops, and shorelines of Cape Town. MORE
PEARLS · 12.09.
- Abjad Hawaz
“If the Arabic language is perceived in that way today, then i’ll create it with my own body” MORE - Reluctance
In a proscribed mass, a ritual of deliverance is orchestrated as ecstatic bodies, exhilarated by the joy of being together, find themselves irresistibly caught in the delicious clutches of decadence. MORE - Satu Garis Menurun | Inherited Line
We inherit more than blood. Through wind, water and two inseparable bodies, Satu Garis Menurun unfolds as a meditation on the invisible legacy of prayers, resilience and memory passed from one generation to the next. MORE - Fallen Memory
A man wakes to a batik cloth that stirs his desire — straining against invisible restraint, he merges with it and is free. MORE - Nouage
Where the land ends and the sea begins, two bodies lose themselves. MORE - La Ultimata Isla
Inspired by Nietzsche’s chapter “The Wanderer” from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: The ruins of a castle at the end of the world, overgrown by nature, come to life through a body that reflects melancholy and memory. MORE - Babadana ( The Opening)
Through ritual, dance, and body-based practices, three traditional practitioners seek to restore the connection between humans and nature. Babadana (The Opening) reinterprets inherited knowledge through an experimental cinematic language. MORE
We are looking forward to welcome you at POOL!