Engaging with desire and alienation, artist and choreographer Alex Baczyński-Jenkins presents his new work Malign Junction (Goodbye, Berlin), developed for the atrium of Gropius Bau. In his practice, he approaches choreography as a way of reflecting on themes of feeling, perception and collectivity, while indulging in other ways of experiencing memory, time and change.
Baczyński-Jenkins’ new performance gestures towards Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, set in the final days of Berlin’s nightlife and cabaret culture during the rise of fascism. Berlin functions both as a specific location and as a site of projection – embodying histories of state violence, transformation, life within countercultures, concepts of freedom and endings. The choreography unfolds as an unspectacular “grand finale”, with performers dancing on the edge of an ending. Malign Junction (Goodbye Berlin) navigates the tension between loss, anger, seduction, the eerie and ecstatic abandon.
Through intimate and fragmentary exchanges between the performers, Baczyński-Jenkins’ choreographies explore the structures and politics of desire. His work is deeply relational, which is rooted in the collaborative ways it is developed and performed, as well as in its choreographic material. This includes tracing relations between sensation and sociality, embodied expression and alienation, everyday experience, the utopian and latent queer histories.
Alex Baczyński-Jenkins is also the co-founder of Kem, a Warsaw-based queer feminist collective focused on choreography, performance and sound that interfaces with social practice. Through various experimental formats and community building, Kem engages in critical intimacy and queer pleasure.
Malign Junction (Goodbye, Berlin) / Alex Baczyński-Jenkins
March 14–15, 2025
Gropius Bau
Berlin, Germany
