Words by Paula Catalina Riofrio.
From 22nd August – 20th September 2026, LAKE Studios Berlin will host the eighth edition of SUBMERGE a festival of exchange celebrating dance, choreography and artistic practice.
Marcela Giesche, SUBMERGE’s founder, describes it as a choreographic score: “Choreographies are like ways of making structures to encourage something specific to happen. You don’t know what the input is going to be, but somehow through using the same structure you get a similar outcome. It’s like a device — and so is the festival.”
Most festivals place you in front of the work. SUBMERGE places you inside it. The re-creative labs are not general technique classes but careful re-examinations of each invited artist’s own creation process for a specific work. Marcela is precise about what this means in practice: “The artist is asked to look back at their creative process — including the artistic practices, movement methods, improvisational structures, resources and tools that were used. Maybe there’s even a specific story they want to share about how that piece was made – for example, sometimes you have an epiphany or a lucky mistake/coincidence in the middle of the process.” The labs offer a submersion into how a piece came to exist, moving through the layers of a work from the inside. Those who pass through the lab arrive at the performance already changed. The artists feel it too — “Going through this re-creative process updates and makes the work alive again,” says Marcela. “As you then perform, it’s a very special feeling when you have people that you’ve been working with as part of your audience.”
The festival doesn’t ask you to admire choreography. It asks you to enter and engage with it. One of SUBMERGE’s founding pillars is accessibility. All professional labs are offered entirely free of cost, made possible through the Berlin Senate funding that LAKE Studios reapplies for year after year. The belief is simple: training, knowledge exchange and fostering solidarity in the artistic and local communities should not carry a price tag. LAKE is also barrier free and there is additional accessibility and travel support within Berlin available upon request.
Berlin’s dance community — local and international, emerging and established — deserves a platform like SUBMERGE that is genuinely open. This year, fifteen international and locally rooted artists and groups — curated from 250 applications across Europe — were selected with an eye towards work that speaks beyond the mainstream contemporary dance bubble. Work for children and youth sits alongside work for adults on exactly the same platform. Additionally, ecological and political themes run through several of this year’s pieces.
The festival’s first day includes the All Styles Battle SUBMERGE YOUR STYLE in collaboration with OPEN YOUR MIND – the winner takes home a free LAKE artist residency. The second opening day takes the dancing out of the studios: SUBMERGE EMERGE will take a small group of participants out into the parks and public spaces along Friedrichshagen, including the swimmable Müggelsee. “The idea is to connect the movements of dance to the movement in public spaces, while also experimenting with the state of performance” says Marcela.
What’s more, shared lunches throughout the festival — funded from outside the official budget, because institutional arts funding do not permit spending on food — are treated as structurally essential and ways to foster an even deeper sense of community. “Eating together always makes the exchanges go deeper. It’s the moment when people make friends and find collaborators because in all other moments you’re working and your attention is elsewhere.”
The festival closes with a double bill by Koffi-Kégou Afiadegnigban (Togo) and Omer Keinan (Berlin) and a forum — About Dance: Forming Futures, led by Siegmar Zacharias on the topic of decolonising non-violent communication. Naturally, a festival so committed to exchange must also examine the conditions of that exchange itself.
SUBMERGE is a beautiful intricate choreography; a score designed to welcome you and “get inside the work”. Come, dive in! LAKE Studios are waiting for you in South East Berlin, a mere eighteen minute S-bahn ride from Ostkreuz.
Book here: https://lakestudiosberlin.com/event/submerge-festival-2026/