The Body as Medium, The Body as Archive

Following two large-scale group works – ENSEMBLE (2023) and ATTEMPTS OF TOGETHERNESS (2025) – in which Jenny Beyer choreographically explored collective decision-making processes, she now turns her focus radically inward: to a solo work. The starting point is the biography of her grandfather, Walter “Ali” Beyer, who passed away in 2004. Raised in Hamburg’s working-class milieu, shaped by communist ideals and politically engaged from an early age, he became active in the resistance after 1933, was imprisoned, and survived only thanks to the solidarity of fellow prisoners. Friends and family members were arrested, some of them murdered.

BACK TO ALI is a documentary dance solo – a choreographic investigation into how political decision-making becomes embodied. The work intertwines personal memory with historical research, asking what path a family history takes through the body of a granddaughter and performer. Jenny Beyer works on two levels: a documentary one – drawing on interviews, personal testimonies, transcribed memories, indictments, and historical documents – and a deeply personal one: the relationship between granddaughter and grandfather.

Jenny Beyer combines biographical investigation with the question of what her grandfather’s history of resistance means today – for herself and for a present in which right-wing movements not only relativize historical responsibility but rhetorically renew and politically reactivate National Socialist ideologies. Her body becomes a site of remembrance and a space in which central questions are negotiated: What is worth telling? Why am I telling this story – and not that of my other grandfather, who was a Nazi? What enables people to resist? Where does the responsibility of the present begin?

An audio description, available through headphones, makes the work accessible to blind and visually impaired audiences. The project is accompanied by OPEN STUDIOS, offering insights into the creative development process, and was created within the framework of Shared Leadership in Dance, a collaboration between the choreographers Jenny Beyer, Antje Pfundtner in Gesellschaft, and Ursina Tossi.

Audioflyer

Premiere

25. March 2026 | Kampnagel Hamburg

Further performances
26.-28. March 2023 | Kampnagel Hamburg

23.04.2026, Ein Abend für Esther Bejarano, Uebel&Gefährlich

02., 03. Oktober 2026, Fabrik Potsdam

ZURÜCK ZU ALI is a production by Jenny Beyer in co-production with Kampnagel Hamburg, funded by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg as part of Shared Leadership in Dance (SLiD). SLiD is a commitment to collaboration as well as to the sharing of knowledge, resources, and work in dance, initiated by choreographers Jenny Beyer, Antje Pfundtner in Gesellschaft (APiG), Ursina Tossi, and their teams.