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On the night of April 30th, Hexenfeuer burn across Germanic and Nordic lands. Traditionally lit to mark the arrival of spring and ward off witches and evil spirits, these bonfires become gathering points for the outcasts, the healers and the unruly, places to share what could not be said in daylight, to pass on forbidden knowledge and to build community at the margins of society. This Walpurgisnacht, that fire burns again, ignited by the collective Wide Open! Berlin’s creatures of the night crawl out of the darkrooms and dance floors to take center stage at Berliner Ringtheater as part of Neue Zukunft’s Hausfest, with the audience invited to circle, dance and celebrate around a 360° raised platform. Wide Open calls on six queer underground artists to fuel a Hexenfeuer with their most ritualistic performances of DIY spellcasting.

Feeding the fire:

Syrian-born DJ Majdolen, resident of Power Dance Club, is the thread that runs throughout the entire evening, channeling a mystical live sonic universe that binds each performance together and transforms the theatre into a dancefloor.

Hassandra, drag artist, performer, and co-founder of ADIRA, takes over the bonfire to explore water’s healing virtues through a live ceremony reflecting on the Mediterranean Sea, drop by drop. Her ritual evokes water’s dual nature: life-sustaining and fearsome. It is a purifying force, as in the sacred Zamzam water, and a vessel of loss, marked by the blood of shipwrecked refugee boats.

Jiannyuh Wang commands the bonfire with a slow, hypnotic fusion of traditional Chinese calligraphy and contemporary choreography. Armed with a giant brush, red ink and an oversized roll of paper, they merge the act of writing with ecstatic movement, flowing to the pulse of the music. Calligraphy, already a dance of the hand, expands into a full-body and visceral ritual. The ink runs. The paper tears. In this ritual, every word is a spell, flowing past the page and transforming the space itself.

Iacopo Loliva, contemporary dancer and choreographer, enters the fire with a performance inspired by tarantism, a South Italian ritual often associated with bodies deemed excessive, queer or unruly. In the original rite, outcasts were allowed to dance and let loose only when pretending to be bitten by a spider, entering a trance in which everything was permitted. Only through this total trance could they be restored from their “madness’’. Here, that logic remains, but without the need for a cure: sanity and insanity coexist.

Erratum (Blair Transdorf and Sascha the Fool) unleash a séance where the abject tips into the grotesque, leaving the audience with one deeply unsettling question: why the hell am I attracted to this? Moving through the crowd with a bucket of viscous substance, the duo launches into a paradoxical cleansing ritual that blurs the line between purification and contamination, desire and disgust. Bodies slip, fall and oscillate between the sacred and the absurd.