With a vision of creating a dance festival focussed on inclusion and diversity in Berlin’s public space centres, Uta Kargel and Steve Joshua Dyffort initiated the TanzMit! Festival. The duo who go by the name Palo y Piedra are now preparing for its second edition that will be held directly at Potsdamer Platz, they are donning multiple hats of curation, production, fund-raising and organisation for the festival. In this conversation with Parvathi Ramanathan, they share more about TanzMit! 2025, and their motivation of the festival being a site of joy and togetherness through the arts. 
TanzMit! 2025 – with a mixed programme of performances and workshops for different ages and all degrees of ability – will be held at Potsdamer Platz from August 28 to September 13.

Parvathi: How and why did your intention for curation with the focus on diversity and inclusion come about?

Steve Joshua: The simple idea is to have a festival about dance in the widest sense of what dance can be in all its diversity, variety and possibilities of engagement. Yes, there are dance professionals training over 30 years and working with big companies. But there are also people who gather regularly to practice Scottish folk dance and perform once a year. Then we have dance activities addressing children and focussing on inclusion. We wanted to create space even for people moving for the first time in a group and feeling the possibilities that dance can offer them. All this combined is dance.

Uta: We are both performing artists and we like the idea of just playing, creating, expressing oneself and also bringing people together with art. We find that dance is the simplest way to do this. So this was also a reason to create a festival with this intention, especially in times like these. 

Parvathi: Did you find that such a wide perspective of dance was missing from the Berlin dance festivals until now?

Steve Joshua: I feel very strongly that there are a lot of interesting bubbles in the Berlin dance scene but they don't connect. Due to the circumstances, everybody is fighting for their own approach to dance and for sustenance. Someone practicing contemporary dance may talk down salsa as a dance form and not see it as an educated dance. But then when we look deeply in any dance form, we find experienced professionals that have a lot of skills to offer. For us with TanzMit!, we want to bring them together on one stage. I believe that a lot of these bubbles can learn from each other. Apart from that, personally, I sometimes enjoy more to improvise with people that don't have so much experience. The pressures of presenting a perfect piece in a theatre and striving for funding can be a hindrance sometimes from accessing the very simple joy that dance brings. 

Uta: Having been an actress in the past, I know there are houses of theatre that remain accessible only to people who are already clued in to what this space and form has to offer. But people around who don't have access to this information, face barriers in joining as participants or audiences. Through TanzMit!, we find it necessary to bring art to people. So it's a kind of offering – for dancers or artists and also for people who may have never heard about a certain dance – of connecting with each other. 

Parvathi: Considering that different production houses or venues tend to draw very different audience, how does doing a festival in an open public space help your mission? 

Steve Joshua: One of the core ideas of our festival is to really bring the art to the people. Being in public space allows for a lot of unexpected discoveries. People don't come there necessarily just for the festival. They go for sightseeing, for work, for shopping or are just passing by. The festival might introduce them to a form they may otherwise never encounter. For example, if you don't know about Butoh, Swing dance or Krump, you don't go looking for it in any Berlin venues or dance classes. Even if this captures the mind of one person, then we are creating new audiences for these dances. Otherwise usually the same audiences turn up repeatedly within each dance bubble. But this bubble is not getting new impulses.

Uta: At the same time, this bubble is also telling you what dance is. But dance has so many faces and facets. We are trying also to remind people that each person is dancing a totally different kind of dance, and each of them is making art. There's such a huge community of dancers in Berlin we recognize with so many faces. And when they start to get louder and get more visibility, we can maybe change more, get more money and support. Rather than doing our stuff on the edge, we are bringing dance to the city’s centres. We are also showing that here is a big community of creators and audiences for it, as well as the common people who enjoy dancing.

Steve Joshua: Therefore, it was important to include diverse styles of dance and show that there's a community behind it.

Uta: There are so many unexpected cross-sections too. Just a few days back, I found a queer dance group doing Bavarian Schuhplatter dance. We have, for example, always this dancing group from Spandau – most of them are also around 60 years old – who are dancing workers dances. But they are so full of joy and interest in everything else. Based on what we have learnt from our travels, we would also love to curate more historical dances, contemporary and folk dances from different countries, different interpretations and approaches to these forms. For us it's also interesting to bring them together with totally different communities and new audiences. Similarly, TanzMit!’s performance and workshop programming also brings new long-term participants for the artists’ regular classes around the city.

Parvathi: It would be lovely to hear some of the encounters with the public you observed in the last edition of TanzMit! at Alexanderplatz.

Uta: At Alexanderplatz, there are a many lost people – people without homes who miss being seen and being touched for a long time, and also being part of a group or structure or an idea. They were surprised by now suddenly being part of a workshop. The next day they came back with new t-shirts, fresh and prepared. So dance was, in these days, perhaps a kind of island for people in these circumstances. This was also kind of reminder for us what dance is or what makes dance so special. Crucially, participation was and is completely free-of-cost for everyone, which allowed this kind of access. 

Steve Joshua: Last year we also had a Butoh performance by an older woman who performed naked. In the beginning we weren’t sure if this would work. People were sitting around and there was a group of young boys with their smartphones. But this performer was very expressive, and in the end the boys stayed not just because there is an old naked woman. They stayed because they were touched by her performance. They could see that she was strong and alive in her performance. 
Having started my own journey with busking on the streets, I can say that the distance between the audience and the performer is a little bit shorter in the public. In the big theatre, everything is perfect, perfect lighting and you have perfect conditions to perform. But it's a different connection and approach to the audience. Somehow it touches differently.

Parvathi: The public space certainly offers new possibilities as there is an element of chance at various levels. To me Potsdamer Platz is like a banking centre. How do you imagine this choice of venue for TanzMit! 2025?

Uta: Yes, maybe it's time to overwrite this connotation and create a new kind of Potsdamer Platz. It feels like a dead space but maybe this is time to reclaim its’ streets through art. I see the nature of public space change with this diverse kind of curation that we do. If you never dance at Potsdamer Platz or Alexanderplatz, it will always be this shopping area or business area. But if we dance there, it changes how we remember them. Maybe its funnier or you see your city with different eyes from this time. 

Steve Joshua: In Berlin, I feel like we don't really have a central downtown. The artificial creation of Potsdamer Platz didn't work in this sense – one is mostly only passing by. But as performers, it could bring us to encounters very different and mixed audiences like the intellectuals, the homeless, the families, the tourists, everybody. And this is really like a very strong point of our festival. Yes, in Pankow we may perhaps have a quieter and focussed audience for what we do, but then we also see our festival as a kind of representation of what Berlin is and importantly, keep it all free-of-cost. it's also simple, it's not like we're trying to stop all the wars directly, you know? We're doing 17 days on Potsdamer Platz and we invite everybody to dance. Dancing is for everybody and from everybody.

Parvathi: Can you talk about the festival from the perspective of the current arts funding budget cuts in Berlin?

Steve Joshua: After the pandemic and after all these cuts there's huge frustration in the scene. We are not funded and we are not experts in funding. We tried something, we tried to inform ourselves about what is possible, but we also realized we are too diverse in our curation to receive some of the focussed formal funding. We welcome any leads if you know someone who could help us. As a model of funding, we are thinking of the market – that is the businesses, shops and stalls – that operate around where our festival takes place. We also try to programme and curate for the people who are selling the food, aware that this is a place of work for some which for others may be a place to relax. And as a way to support the artists, dancers and choreographers of Berlin, we try to be a space for showcasing their work to a diverse and new audience. 

Parvathi: What are some of your hopes and visions for the festival in the following years?

Uta: We would like to connect with more schools. We would like to include Turkish dances too at the festival, especially because we have such a huge Turkish community here. There is now a change with audiences – beyond the big choreographers with a lot of performance experience, we have this kind of Instagram generation that has a superlatively huge community. We can't grasp it yet, but we will see. We would also love the presence of more of the dance scene itself. We hope that some of those non-professional dancers who joined a workshop last year, come to perform or showcase their work in the upcoming editions. More peace in the head of people, more smiles on their faces, more movements in their bodies.