International Summer Festival 2025

From 6 to 24 August 2025, the International Summer Festival will transform Hamburg into a vibrant stage between daydream and reality. Under the motto ‘Room to Dream’, borrowed from David Lynch's memoir of the same name, this year's festival invites you to leave the familiar behind and immerse yourself in artistic worlds in which narratives are broken up and the future is reimagined.
With international productions, radical voices and cross-genre works, a polyphonic programme of performance, dance, theatre, music, parties and discourse unfolds - sensual, political and always with an open eye for what could be possible.

Festival kicks off with spiritual vigour
The legendary Pakistani musician Ustad Noor Bakhsh kicks off the festival in the atmospheric Avant-Garten. A diverse programme will be offered there every evening with free admission - from literature and discourse with voices such as Meron Mendel and Saba-Nur Cheema to the immersive JAJAJA headphone performances.
At the same time, the curtain will rise on "Nôt", a magical tale about the power of stories at night, staged by the acclaimed choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas in the large hall k6.

Radical narratives
In the world premiere of ‘longing to tell’, intimate stories of Black women meet a cross-genre composition by akua naru, Tyshawn Sorey, Ensemble Resonanz and Anta Helena Recke. Florentina Holzinger's latest work is a feminist alternative to the delusion of immortality - an explosive theatre experience on the border between dream and nightmare.
Further highlights from the global South come with radical energy and political acuity: Carolina Bianchi exposes patriarchal violence on and off stage, Gabriela da Cunha fights for ecological justice in the Amazon with her performance, while Anacarsis Ramos brings personal stories about poverty and dignity to the stage together with his mother.

Performance meets visual arts
The boundaries between theatre, dance and visual arts are blurring: Festival icons Miet Warlop and Oona Doherty create lively works of stage art from fabric, myth and memory. In addition to the Kampnagel production, Doherty will perform in all the venues of the Kunstmeile Hamburg with an all-day performance marathon.
Co-operations with Hamburg institutions extend the festival radius: with Joanna Warsza, art moves to the Stadtpark, while the Kunsthalle, MARKK and other museums present performance specials - including with the dance icon La Ribot. In ‘Autothérapie’, the French-Haitian artist Mackenzy Bergile interweaves museum and stage to create an art of memory in motion. And Davi Pontes & Wallace Ferreira prove that dance can be radical body poetry even without stage lighting and sound design.

A festival full of music, movement and urban interventions
Kid Koala conquers the city centre with his anarchic charm: the Canadian multi-artist brings creative life to vacant spaces with pigeon painting and robot dance parades. And in the Volksdorf museum village, the Nesterval collective is building an entire alpine theatre village - an immersive spectacle with mountain hut romanticism and swansongs to Europe by Christoph Marthaler.
Musically, the festival ranges from soulful harmonies (Infinity Song) and punk energy (Die Nerven) to the Elbphilharmonie: Seun Kuti and Noname perform there, as does Isabelle Huppert with the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, two choirs and a total of over 200 participants in Rufus Wainwright's "Dream Requiem" - a finale that epitomises the poetic essence of the festival.

Artistic, dreamy, radical: welcome to Room to Dream!
The Summer Festival 2025 is a passionate appeal for other narratives, for sensual experience and collective reverie. It invites you to lose yourself - in the material, in the sound, in the movement - and is also a promise: a festival that opens up new spaces: for dreams, transformation and social visions.