The Guide to Attending b12 Berlin Festival for Contemporary Dance & Performance Art

19 October 2024

b12 Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance Art (officially stylized in all lowercase) is an annual dance festival every July in Berlin, Germany. A training ground for professional-level dancers, the Festival offers more than 70+ research workshops, along with somatic, yoga, and outreach classes; free improv sessions; performance projects; and more. Their slogan is, “Research or die.”

I attended b12 from July 1 - 28, 2024.

This guide is based on my personal experiences and is in no way intended to discredit, defame, or maliciously criticize the event. Please refer to the organizer’s official website for the latest program updates and festival schedule.

b12 is a long festival. Covering 4 weeks in July, it’s one of the biggest dance training festivals in the world. With their strategic location in Berlin, teachers, facilitators, and participants come from all over to take part and perform. For me, hailing from Canada, attending b12 for the entire month was a serious dedication that took half a year to finalize.

What is dance travel?

Also known as “dance tourism,” dance travel is the dancer’s key to seeing the world while developing their craft.

dance travel — n. a means of travelling the world using dance as a catalyst and/or foremost purpose; activities can include taking workshops, attending festivals, teaching dance, and more.

There are several steps to follow for attending any dance festival abroad or in-nation:

1. Do your research. Which festival do you want to attend and when? What is the destination like? Do you need a Visa?
2. Get the money, and manage your budget.
3. Sign up. Look up their website.
4. Apply for grants (optional but highly recommended!).
5. Prepare travel essentials like cash exchanges, money debit cards, and travel insurance.
6. Pack light. Pack like a dancer.

b12 was an immensely provoking experience filled with highs and lows. I learned so much not just in dance but also organizing an extended trip in general.

With this guide, I hope to give you unfiltered, reflective insight into the particular quirks and workings of b12 Festival for Contemporary Dance & Performance Art.

Your travel documents

Before you even consider going abroad, check that your passport is valid for at least 6 months beyond your trip. Check your government website for any visas or other documents needed for the destination, as well as risk advisories. Renewing your passport and/or applying for visas will all take some time, so factor this into your planning.

The website

b12’s website is an accessibility nightmare. If you’ve already been on it, rest assured you and I aren’t the only ones who think this. One of the reasons for this is the sheer amount of workshops, classes, free events, and performance projects b12 currently offers. That’s 70+ options for the summer festival alone, which inevitably comes with scheduling conflicts, even more so with the different deadlines and admission processes for different workshops.

The website tries to organize all this by offering tabs and filters to view workshops by date, length, type, teacher, and/or the general calendar. Unfortunately this means pages within pages, tabs within tabs, and it becomes such a challenge to find anything directly that I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to just scrap the design and make an Excel sheet.

In fact, I did make an Excel chart for myself with the workshops I most wanted to take and then another one for my final schedule.

If you wanted to find information about the much-sought-after work/study exchange, for example, you’d have to go to menu > about > team > and find the email contact for the person organizing work/study. Considering how popular the exchange is, it seems un-intuitive to me to place information about it under “team.”

There were also many design bugs when I registered. If I had several tabs open listing different workshops, and I wanted to add them all to my cart, I’d have to choose one tab to add each workshop by searching for them one-by-one. Otherwise, the cart wouldn’t sync with my previous adds on different tabs.

And if none of this is time-consuming enough, everything is in lowercase. Have you ever tried writing a grant and copy-pasting an all-lowercase biography? I have, and it is not fun to convert everything to proper grammar again.

There’s nothing wrong with stylizing, but I don’t think the government would smile upon an all-lowercase funding application. More about grants below.

Choosing your workshops

Looking through the workshop descriptions and videos, you’ll notice that b12 is very acrodancing-heavy. This is true throughout the European dance scene in general. I find they have a much greater emphasis on flow and acrodance floorwork.

What is acrodance? According to my b12 teacher, acrodance came from circus in an effort to find safer ways for circus artists to do their tricks and tumbles in unsafe environments (i.e. away from the foam-cushioned sprung mats of circus training gyms). It combines acrobatics, contemporary dance, and often parkour and breakdancing to form a seamless, flowing sequence of movement that works with inertia.

Apart from acrodance, there are also several workshops in partnering, physical theatre, dance on camera, and a host of free improv jam sessions and movie nights. Performance projects, somatic workshops, and outreach workshops are separate items and have different fees and admission requirements.