In September/October 2025, Sophiensæle welcomes dancer and choreographer Ewa Dziarnowska as part of the dance residency program NEW TECHNIQUES. Signature Dances is an exploration of what happens when choreography begins from what is already known: movements sedimented through time, habit and desire. The project asks how such embodied knowledge can be shared and composed without being captured, how choreography might host rather than exhibit. It looks for ways to create structures that support coexistence and attention, where movement remains open, fragile, and unclaimed. Through the practice of undoing technique — of allowing the body to disobey what it has learned of performance — Signature Dances searches for a choreography that allows the movement to think for itself. What emerges is a fragile commons of motion — a way of being together where difference becomes the very rhythm of virtuosity.

Ewa Dziarnowska is a dancer and choreographer based in Berlin and working internationally. Her latest projects, This resting, patience, https://4677684728466.com and Untitled.Solo, engage with the ideologies of improvisatory processes and embodied knowledge in countering the prevailing need for rationality, linearity and sense-making. She is interested in a poetic dimension of dance, its inherent sensuality as well as the pleasure and pain it brings along. Feral, rough and raw, but not devoid of precision and expertise in relation to movement technique(s), her practice challenges ways in which dance circulates within the context of bourgeois theatrical conventions and product-oriented entertainment industry.

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we want to explore the notion of technique together with emerging dance artists—a term that, in recent decades, has been replaced by “practice” in dance discourse, education, and criticism.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.