Alex Baczyński-Jenkins Contends With Berlin’s Past and Present

A raised, rectangular stage sits at an angle in the centre of Berlin’s Gropius Bau atrium, its edges traced by white neon lights. Two doorframes stand on opposite sides, and a gnarled, metal, tree-like sculpture looms in one corner. One by one, dancers enter the space – some marching robotically with raised arms, others shuffling as their arms rotate in jerky circles. Their rigid, puppet-like movements evoke German painter George Grosz’s Republican Automatons (1920), a caricatured depiction of post-World War I Germany, where dehumanized figures, composed of angular limbs and vacant faces, move mechanically through a fractured society.

This is the opening to artist and choreographer Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’s Malign Junction (Goodbye, Berlin) (2025), a performance gesturing towards American author Christopher Isherwood’s similarly titled novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939). It’s a timely choice of subject matter: the book’s foreboding depiction of encroaching repression, set during the final days of Berlin’s nightlife and cabaret culture in the late 1930s, feels relevant to contemporary Germany, where rising police violence against political protests, depleting arts funding and the far-right AfD’s electoral gains signal a shifting landscape. The progressive sexual freedoms of Weimar Berlin – which were ultimately shattered by the rise of fascism – also serve as a fitting historical parallel for Baczyński-Jenkins, whose work often explores queer affect, embodiment and relationality.

Malign Junction places less emphasis on Goodbye to Berlin itself than the movement style of Bob Fosse, the American choreographer behind Cabaret, the 1972 film inspired by Isherwood’s characters. After the mechanical opening, Baczyński-Jenkins’s cast snaps into fragmented phrases of wrist rolls with extended fingers, sway their splayed-fingered jazz hands side to side in front of their chests and clutch top hats as they slide diagonally across the space – all direct references to Fosse’s quirky, sultry and meticulous choreography. In a fleeting scene, two dancers tap dance, the speed and intensity of their footwork increasing as if someone has lit a fire underneath them – an allusion to the German Foreign Minister Gustave Stresemann’s 1929 statement that, economically speaking, Weimar ‘Germany [was]… dancing on a volcano’, perhaps? It’s a metaphor that feels as relevant today as it did a century ago.

There are key differences in the framing of these Fosse-inspired movements, however. Rather than donning leotards and suspenders like Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, the dancers in Malign Junction sport a mismatched assortment of tie-dyed vest tops, sports shoes and camo trousers, grounding the performance in a contemporary context. The musical accompaniment consists of loud, atmospheric electronic beats, with the only remnant of Cabaret’s original theatrical score being a sample of the iconic drum roll and cymbal crash from ‘Willkommen’ (1972), the opening track of the musical. Its frequent repetition throughout one section creates a sense of impending doom, evoking a reality that feels on the brink of disaster.

The execution of Baczyński-Jenkins’s choreography also diverges from the source material, but to a lesser effect. While Fosse’s work is known for its precision, some dancers in Malign Junction fall out of sync, miss cues and drop into crouching positions slightly before or after the aforementioned cymbal crashes. Their lacklustre movements and deadpan faces might suggest a commentary on fatigue in the face of an increasingly precarious economic and political landscape. This said, it’s ultimately unclear if the dancers’ ennui in Malign Junction is deliberate or due to a lack of clear movement intention. Pastiche works best when it’s clear that the performers are well versed in the style or technique they’re referencing. Without a strong command of the material, Malign Junction loses impact.

The plethora of references the work makes to movement vocabularies, images and ideas outside of the stated frame also contributes to a blurring of intent. For example, Fosse-inspired steps are interspersed and later almost completely replaced with folk or country dance-like skips and arm catches, as well as soft, waif-like arm positions and the assumption of loose circular formations – reminiscent of Matisse’s The Dance (1910) – which seem more aligned with 1800s Romantic ballet than the aloof, sultry jazz of the 1920s and ’30s. Towards the end of the performance, the cast descend into over-extended scenes of nondescript torso rippling, hopping and jerking, suggesting that a 60-minute run time stretches Baczyński-Jenkins’s ideas too thin.

Malign Junction begins with a compelling premise but loses focus, skimming the surface of its many allusions rather than fully engaging with them. ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,’ wrote Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin. Baczyński-Jenkins seems to follow this approach in this work, investing more in fleeting aesthetic references than in deep physical exploration or a clear conceptual framework. The question remains: How many disparate, unexamined images can an audience be presented with before a performance loses its meaning? 

Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’s Malign Junction (Goodbye, Berlin) took place at Gropius Bau, Berlin, on 14 and 15 March 

_{Main image: Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, Malign Junction (Goodbye, Berlin), 2025, performance still. Courtesy: © Gropius Bau; photograph: Maximilian Koppernock}