In February/March 2026, Sophiensæle welcomes choreographers  Burcu Bilgiç and Nicole Wysokikamien and their team as part of the dance residency program NEW TECHNIQUES.

Focusing on the 1990s telenovela Muñeca Brava, the research departs from the series’ transnational circulation across Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. It approaches melodrama as an embodied technique: a non-institutional language absorbed through collective spectatorship in late 1990s television.

During the residency, Burcu Bilgiç and Nicole Wysokikamien, together with the performer and musician Anton Gerzina, hack Muñeca Brava’s scenes, diving into their early imaginaries of gender, class, and desire. Nostalgia and cringe become tools for revisiting these imaginaries. Working with movement material drawn from the show—long gazes, confrontations, stillness, sudden runs—the research reorganizes these elements to open them to new affective possibilities. 

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we want to explore the notion of technique together with emerging dance artists—a term that, in recent decades, has been replaced by “practice” in dance discourse, education, and criticism.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