‘Healing Hate’ – The city becomes a stage
Body, love, politics: euro-scene Leipzig 2025 explores how people become a form of resistance. The festival's opening ‘Healing Hate’, reveals just how political hatred can be.
As every year, the euro-scene took place in Leipzig this November – an international dance festival. In its 35th edition, explored the theme ‘LOVE BODY POLITICS’. The festival presented performances that dealt with how political love and the human body are.
The festival’s opening event, ‘Healing Hate’, a piece by the Austrian-Swiss-German collective Caravan of Luv performed at the Leipzig Opera, raises questions about love, hate and the human body and mind right at the start of the festival. In a ritual-like performance, the twelve-member collective uses music and communal singing to create an experience that leaves the audience feeling inspired as they leave the hall after two hours.
Right at the beginning of the performance, it gets political – Belgrade, March 18th, 2025; the police stopped student protests with a sonic weapon. A weapon that is not only banned in Serbia, but also demonstrated that hatred has a sound. The Caravan of Luv collective seeks the opposite. ‘Healing Hate’ asks the question: if we know what hatred sounds like, what does love sound like?
The ritual has a psychedelic effect, and Caravan of Luv is a collective that only stays in cities for a short time, celebrating a kind of Woodstock 4.0 (Woodstock was the one of the most important Hippiefestivals during the 1960s), before moving on to the next city. Even before the performances, all Leipzig residents were invited to write to an email account held by the collective telling them what they really hate. The concept behind it all is to let out all the hatred together to free ourselves from it and to feel the connection people can feel through words and music. During the first few minutes, the collective plays music in front of the opera house, and then leads everyone inside. In the hall itself, parts of the audience also begin to sing along, creating a truly magical atmosphere.
Various themes arise during this spiritual ceremony. What is it like to be a stranger? Is being a stranger an opportunity to subordinate individual feelings to a community structure? Can it help us to feel a collective experience of connection that is lacking in the post-digital world?
A connection to Leipzig is also established by portraying it as a political city. The show marks the start of a tour that will take the Caravan of Luv to locations across Europe, such as Vienna and Prague. Leipzig is portrayed as a city of change, where not only the Peaceful Revolution took place in 1989, but where there now should also be a revolution towards a world in which community once again plays a more important role, starting with Caravan of Luvs performance. Part of this world are also conflicts that are openly fought out and then end in peace and tranquillity.
At the end of the performance, the collective leaves the hall, while playing music, and the trance-like sounds invite the audience to come along and feel how the sound of the music connects them within a common rhythm.
‘Healing Hate’ encourages reflection. How do we want to live in society? How do we deal with hatred and how do we make community more tangible again? The Caravan of Luv offers one answer, albeit a simple one: it is in our own hands. We can change cities, villages and forms of society, because we define and create them.
Titelbild: Ines Bacher
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