06.August 2025 – 24.August 2025
INTERNATIONAL SUMMER FESTIVAL 2025
Dear guests,
David Lynch, the late master of cinematic ambiguity, who passed away in 2025, writes in his memoir “Room to Dream“:
“I always say I don’t go by nighttime dreams because it’s daydreaming that I like. I love the logic of dreams, though. Anything can happen, and it makes sense.”
That dream-logic applies to theater too — at least when it dares, like Lynch, to break with convention, leaving behind well-trodden narrative paths and familiar aesthetic routines. Then, vast spaces open up, governed by a different logic, where dreams of other realities can take shape. For this Summer Festival — conceived as a space for drifting and dreaming — we’ve borrowed Lynch’s book title. In this artistic state of suspension between reality and fiction, you might lose yourself in the slow-motion flicker of a “Mulholland Drive”-like stage world, take the room to dream as an invitation to imagine futures shaped by justice and equality — or escape the brutal clarity of dawn in the ecstatic sweat of a dancefloor.
This festival is all about such spaces for exploring and envisioning. We’ll guide you through them here, with our usual service spirit. We begin — appropriately — with music described by Pitchfork as “grasping for the spiritual and indefinable, that burrows into your soul and glows there”: a concert by Pakistani master Ustad Noor Bakhsh, in the Avant-Garden, Hamburg’s art-meets-leisure gem. Every festival evening, this space hosts a free program ranging from literature and debate to the legendary JAJAJA headphone performances. And when night falls over the Osterbek Canal, things turn magical – just like in our opening production “Nôt”, a visionary piece on post-sunset storytelling by choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas, who is also opening this year’s Festival d’Avignon with “Nôt” in the mythical Cour d’honneur of the Palais des Papes.
That stories can make reality visible is evident in “longing to tell — the blues opera”, a world premiere based on Black women’s narratives about sexuality, created by US rapper akua naru, Pulitzer-winning composer Tyshawn Sorey, Ensemble Resonanz, and director Anta Helena Recke. The third major production in Hall K6 links feminist power to one of humanity’s most persistent dreams – and nightmares: eternal life, as staged by the formidable Florentina Holzinger.
Once again, feminist approaches to the performing arts form a core pillar of this festival. From Carolina Bianchi’s subversive and outstanding new work about theatre, masculinity and violence to Gabriela da Cunha’s reflections on motherhood and poisoned rivers, and Anacarsis Ramos, who takes the stage with his mother to talk about dreams, money, and poverty. Ogemdi Ude opens the festival with a radiant work on Black femininity and majorette dance, while performance icon Miet Warlop conjures 3 km of dream-drenched theatre fabric, seamlessly blending performance and visual art.
Theatre blurs into visual art, too, in the work of Oona Doherty, who first presents a feverish stage piece on Irish myths and her great-great-grandfather, then takes over all six major museums of Kunstmeile Hamburg with live performances and an exhibition at the Kampnagel site. Across the city, more site-responsive art awaits – Joanna Warsza’s Stadtpark parcours, a talk series at MARKK, and a performance special at the Kunsthalle featuring La Ribot and Volmir Cordeiro.
Mackenzy Bergile takes the reverse route – from museum to stage – with “Autothérapie”, a piece about how memories, histories, and dreams pass through bodies and across generations. Similarly, the dance of Brazilian duo Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira unfolds in raw, delicate intensity - outside the conventional theatre space, and without the usual illusion-enhancers of light and sound.
Festival king Kid Koala transforms the city center with robot parades and pigeon painting. And the immersive theatre collective Nesterval conjures an Austrian mountain village in the Volksdorf museum village. Naturally, it all ends in a mountain hut, where, in Christoph Marthaler’s latest piece, perhaps the last Europeans have taken shelter – and yet, in his gentle farewell, there’s always a flicker of hope: the dream never dies as long as we keep singing.
This thread of dreaming runs through the festival’s vibrant music program, too – from the soul-soaked harmonies of Infinity Song to the beautiful noise of Die Nerven, from from sweat-drenched dance floors to orchestral concerts at the Elbphilharmonie. There, we present afrobeat legend Seun Kuti and US rap poet Noname. And the Symphoniker Hamburg provide the closing piece to this introduction: featuring Isabelle Huppert and 200 performers, they will perform Rufus Wainwright’s “Dream Requiem”!
The doors to this festival-room to dream are wide open — come on in!
Our deep gratitude goes out to everyone who helps turn this festival dream into reality. Without you, there would be no dream- ing beneath fabric mountains or on mountaintops.
See you soon — in the Avant-Garden at the very latest,
András Siebold (with Corinna Humuza and the Summer Festival team)
