With Goodbye | Iterations, Nitsan Margaliot’s solo Goodbye takes shape across several stages in Leipzig and culminates in September with its Leipzig premiere at Projektraum Remise 24. The project takes place as part of TACHELES – Year of Jewish Culture in Saxony and unfolds through formats that create encounters between the artist, the audience and Leipzig’s urban context.
In June, Margaliot invites participants to a workshop as part of the Jewish Week in Leipzig, offering insights into his choreographic work and movement practice. A few days later, a work-in-progress showing and an interdisciplinary conversation with cultural studies scholar and ethnologist Dr. Todd Sekuler open up further perspectives on the themes of the piece.
In September, the solo will be presented as part of DIE BUDE, a project by Hermann Heisig and Anne Zacho Søgaard, entering into a thematic dialogue with their audio walk Wenn Wände sprechen.
Dates
As part of Jewish Week in Leipzig:
21 June 2026, 11:00–14:00:
Workshop: Personal Stories and Archives at the Intersection of Text, Image and Body – with Nitsan Margaliot
27 June 2026, 16:00–17:30:
TanzDIALOG – Über | Haltung | Unter: Between Archive and Body – with Nitsan Margaliot and Dr. Todd Sekuler
Venue: 4fT–Tanzplattform Leipzig, Erich-Zeigner-Allee 64e, 04229 Leipzig
In cooperation with Projektraum Remise 24:
11 September 2026, 20:00:
Leipzig premiere of Goodbye, as part of the project DIE BUDE by Hermann Heisig and Anne Zacho Søgaard.
12 September 2026, 20:00:
Second performance of the solo Goodbye, as part of the project DIE BUDE by Hermann Heisig and Anne Zacho Søgaard.
Venue: Remise 24, Leibnizstraße 24, 04105 Leipzig
The performances take place after the performative audio walk Wenn Wände sprechen, which begins at 17:00.
About the solo Goodbye
Emerging from the family history of choreographer and dancer Nitsan Margaliot, Goodbye is a solo that relates to a past that is at once intangible and present. Taking the form of a choreographic journey through absent memories and accompanied by the whispering of the piano, it traces the near impossibility of encountering the past.
His grandfather, born in Chemnitz in 1920 under the name Adolf, fled to Palestine-Israel during the Holocaust and later changed his name to Abraham. Margaliot’s own middle name is Avraham, in memory of him. Having made the reverse journey and spent most of his adult life in Germany, Nitsan Margaliot seeks in Goodbye to reconcile with his burdened family history by bringing traces of the past into coexistence with the present.
Confronting the story of flight and longing that continues to shape his family to this day, Goodbye transforms memory into movement and absence into presence. In a way, it is a protocol for invoking two bodies in one: Margaliot and the grandfather he never met. Goodbye unfolds through an assemblage of archival remnants, bringing together choreographic material and poetic address. The piece transforms a tense past into a physical reckoning through processes of processing, carrying and repositioning.
Workshop
Personal Stories and Archives at the Intersection of Text, Image and Body
In this workshop, Nitsan Margaliot offers insights into the choreographic methods and movement practices from which his solo Goodbye emerges.
Participants will have the opportunity to explore how personal stories and archival material can be translated into movement. Through physical explorations and guided exercises, they will gain insight into the methods Margaliot uses to translate his personal archival materials into experimental scores — methods he also worked with in the development of his solo Goodbye:
“As the piece unfolds, I collage memories and traces that layer themselves over the dancing — a kind of call and response with the past. As the piece develops, the state and texture of my body shift from functional movement into articulated, charged and dense physicalities, eventually reaching a physical state of long exhalation.”
Nitsan’s description offers a first insight into how the translation of memories into danced movement felt for him during the development of Goodbye. Participants are invited to enter into this practice and connect it with their own memories. Together, they will explore how text and image can be transferred into movement, and how memories and historical traces can settle onto movement like a collage. The workshop will also explore how this can create a conversation between past and present. In this way, the engagement with one’s own personal history becomes tangible on an artistic level.
Date: June 21, 2026, 11:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.
Location: 4fT – Tanzplattform Leipzig, Erich-Zeigner-Allee 64e, 04229 Leipzig
Solidarity price: €55 | €45 | €35
Registration: kontakt@tanzplattform-leipzig.de
The workshop will be held in English and is open to anyone interested in dance, movement and choreographic practice.
TanzDIALOG – Über | Haltung | Unter
Between Archive and Body - Work-in-progress showing and interdisciplinary conversation with Nitsan Margaliot and Dr. Todd Sekuler, cultural studies scholar and ethnologist.
Taking Nitsan Margaliot’s solo Goodbye as its point of departure, this dialogue brings artistic, choreographic and cultural studies perspectives on memory, historical testimony and forms of transmission into exchange. The event opens a perspective on the history of Jewish communities between Saxony and Poland — and asks how personal and collective traces continue to resonate in bodies, images and archives into the present, and how the present shapes the way we engage with the past.
As the opening of the dialogue, Nitsan Margaliot presents choreographic material from the ongoing development of his solo Goodbye. Afterwards, he speaks about how he approaches the past through language, family archives and choreographic research — between curiosity, imagination and the desire to better understand the entangled traces of his own history.
Dr. Todd Sekuler then takes the audience along a research path that begins in Tarnów, Poland: with anthropologist Margit Berner’s long-term work with photographic collections from the former ghetto there. The exhibition that emerged from her research, The Cold Eye, is dedicated to the last images of Jewish families from Tarnów. Through his encounter with these materials, Sekuler develops questions about how archives can not only be preserved or explained, but placed into new relationships: with the people whose traces they carry, with the gaps and violence of their making, and with our present. Together with his brother, a filmmaker, Sekuler also asks how historical material can be worked with further — not in the sense of restoring a supposed original, but as an engagement with transmission, loss, medial traces and the gaps between past and present. His presentation touches on questions of historical research as well as artistic and political dimensions of working with archives, memory and the present.
An open exchange with the audience will follow. Together, the discussion will ask how personal and collective archives can be artistically activated, how historical traces continue to resonate in the body, in images and in narratives — and what forms of proximity, responsibility and repositioning may emerge from them in the present.
TanzDIALOG – Über | Haltung | Unter is an interdisciplinary conversation format by 4fT – Tanzplattform Leipzig. It brings dance practitioners together with experts from different fields of knowledge and creates a space in which artistic processes, social questions and different worlds of experience can enter into exchange.
Date: 27 June 2026, 16:00–17:30
Venue: 4fT – Tanzplattform Leipzig, Erich-Zeigner-Allee 64e, 04229 Leipzig
Solidarity price: €16 | €12 | €8
Registration: kontakt@tanzplattform-leipzig.de
The discussion will be held in English.
Leipzig Premiere at Remise 24
The September 2026 performances of Goodbye at Remise 24 take place as part of DIE BUDE, a project by Hermann Heisig and Anne Zacho Søgaard. In doing so, they enter into a thematic dialogue with the performative audio walk Wenn Wände sprechen, which raises questions about how to engage with ruptures and continuities in the history of the house at Leibnizstraße 24: a house that, between 1919 and 1934, was a place of Jewish life in Leipzig as well as the home and prayer house of the Hasidic Rabbi Israel Friedmann; a house that Hermann Heisig’s great-grandfather Hermann Straube acquired in 1935 as the headquarters for his lottery business; a house that Hermann Heisig inherited in 2023, two generations later, and that is now being used as a project space for artistic work.
Just as Goodbye artistically engages with historical traces and asks how working with personal and collective archives can enable a historical sensing — and, through this, a repositioning in the present — Wenn Wände sprechen also asks: How can we engage with history and its ruptures? How can we reflect on our own role within it?
In the audience talk following the final performance of Goodbye, the participating artists will speak about their different approaches and open a space to collectively question individual and collective histories.
Date: 11. & 12. September 2026, 20:00 Uhr
Venue: Remise 24 - Leibnizstraße 24, Leipzig 04105
Price & registration: tba.
The performances take place after the performative audio walk Wenn Wände sprechen, which begins at 17:00.
About Nitsan Margaliot
Nitsan Margaliot is a Berlin-based choreographer and performer. His work engages with relationality through queer, personal and uncanny archives. He holds an MFA in Dance from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His work has been presented at The 5th Floor Tokyo, 14StreetY NYC, the Archiv der Avantgarden – Egidio Marzona, Radialsystem, Berliner Festspiele, Sammlung Hoffmann and Frankfurt LAB.
In 2020, he initiated Touching Margins, an alter-archive, together with Sasha Portyannikova and Anna Chwialkowska. From 2022 to 2024, he co-curated the ACROSS Festival alongside several exhibitions at Galerie Wedding. In 2025, he created BACK TO YOU, a full-length piece for the Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern Dance Company. In 2025/26, he is a resident at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris with the support of the Bureau du théâtre et de la danse / Institut français Germany.
Nitsan Margaliot has been an artist-in-residence at institutions including Tanzhaus Zürich, HELLERAU and tanzhaus nrw. He teaches regularly in the Master in Dance programme at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp and at the Center for Contemporary Dance at the Cologne University of Music and Dance.
About Todd Sekuler
Todd Sekuler is Oberassistent in Popular Cultures at the Institute of Social Anthropology and Empirical Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich. He holds a Master in Public Health from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a PhD in European Ethnology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
His current research engages with newly surfaced objects from pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Tarnów, Poland. Further ongoing research focuses include HIV/AIDS art and activism, queer kinship, and alternative forms of knowledge production and ethnographic practice.
Choreography and performance: Nitsan Margaliot
Dramaturgy: Maxwell McCarthy, Anna Chwiałkowska
Sound design and composition: Antoine Mermet
Costume design: Kaur Hensel
Production management: Charlie Fouchier
Public relations: Niko Jacobi
With thanks to Hermann Heisig and Anne Zacho Søgaard
"Goodbye | Iterations" is a project by 4fT – Tanzplattform Leipzig and Charlie Fouchier, in cooperation with Ariowitsch-Haus and Projektraum Remise 24. The project is funded by the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony. This measure is co-financed by tax revenue on the basis of the budget approved by the Saxon State Parliament. The project is funded by the Cultural Office of the City of Leipzig.
