In August/September 2025, Sophiensæle welcomes choreographer Elvan Tekin and her team as part of the dance residency program NEW TECHNIQUES. During her residency, the artist explores how to engage artistically with cultural heritage without reinforcing neoliberal frameworks of identity politics. She develops techniques and strategies informed by fatalism, catharsis, transcendence, and the potential of intimacy, while examining dance as a social outlet for political pain. In collaboration with Samuel Pereira and Irem Aydin, she ultimately asks: how does the subaltern move against a decaying world order?

Elvan Tekin is a choreographer, dancer, and community organiser based in Berlin. Her choreography is a testament to the enduring spirit of resistance and the quest for liberation. How can the transformative potential of movement be a catalyst for (social) change? In this sense, her practice seeks to mend the fractures caused by rupture and violence, infiltrating and penetrating deeply, like creeks. Elvan is organising and curating the developing curatorial project emergent spaces, which centres queer and trans* feminist perspectives in the diaspora. She holds a Master’s degree in Choreography from HZT, Berlin.

With our dance residency program NEW TECHNIQUES, we support early-career artists based in Berlin and simultaneously reflect on the concept of technique in the contemporary dance scene.
We have named our residency NEW TECHNIQUES because we want to explore the notion of technique together with emerging dance artists—a term that, in recent decades, has been replaced by “practice” in dance discourse, education, and criticism. We ask what technique might mean in today’s pluralized dance world. This exploration is not only about how existing dance techniques taught in schools and studios (from ballet, modern, contemporary dance, or urban styles) relate to cultural identity, power dynamics, historical contexts, or social practices, but also about how other forms of embodied knowledge and self-technologies passed down in our communities and societies influence the field of dance and the artistic practices of the invited choreographers.

The NEW TECHNIQUES residency program is part of the Residency Support for Berlin dance artists, through which the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion first introduced and awarded residency programs in 2020.