Isabel Lewis & Djibril Sall – Sophiensæle | Freies Theater in Berlin

Djibril Sall is a queer Senegalese performer, choreographer, and writer. Born in Dakar, he grew up in a working-class family in the Deep South of the United States of America and was educated at the “elite” Wesleyan University. He describes himself in these terms to illustrate the range of privilege he holds as someone who worked from the peripheries of the Global South to someone who can now move unencumbered within and outside of the borders of the Global North.

His work is situated at the intersection of (racialized) migration and belonging, where he questions the reasons that compel people to leave. This questioning includes his own migration background and his insights into (non)belonging and being in-between. The central question he poses to himself and his audience is: How can trauma become a departure point for exploring pleasure, letting go, disclosure, and open-hearted connection? Djibril was the 2024 Berlin Cultural Exchange Fellow at Cité Internationale des Arts Paris and was the inaugural resident at Emerging Change Festival.

Isabel Lewis is a Dominican-American artist active in the fields of theater, music, and dance and is particularly recognized for introducing the format of the Occasion to the field of Contemporary Art with her presentations at the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2013) followed by Frieze Art Fair London (2014). Through persistent experimentation and embodied research methodologies Lewis creates formats for alternative modes of sociality between human and more-than-human-agents. For Lewis any given format suggests ways of ordering the sensible and so how to engage with format is a deeply political question.

She employs an expanded sense of the choreographic that centers its focus around generating affective bodily experiences that address all the senses in her collaborative practice. Her work has been presented by Dia Art Foundation, Performance Space New York, The Kitchen, Tate Modern, Kunsthalle Basel, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, Tanz im August, Kampnagel, Gropius Bau, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Palais de Tokyo, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Sharjah Biennial, Karachi Biennial Trust, and Kunsthalle Zürich among others. In 2021 she became Professor of Performative Arts at the HGB Leipzig. Together with Rio Rutzinger, Isabel Lewis will take over the artistic direction of the Tanzquartier Wien from the 2025/26 season.