by Carolina Sculti // Jan. 23, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Wellness.
Dominique McDougal and Carro Sharkey’s three-part performance, ‘Did4luv’—a tragicomic dance solo performed by one of the dancers, alternating every night—debuted this month at the dual 30th anniversary of Sophiensaele’s inauguration as a theater and its renowned dance festival, Tanztage. This year’s Tanztage invites its audience to consider the (im)material conditions of artistic production: the body and self as sources for capitalist exchange, the extractive nature of our systems of work and its resulting consequences for marginalized bodies.
Within the precarious laborscape of artistic work, wellness remains a privilege, as most practicing artists strive for simple survival. In Sophiensaele’s publication accompanying this year’s Tantztage, ‘Sophiensaele Forever,’ Lena Kollender and Mateusz Szymanówk discuss the attitudes and structural conditions perpetuating exploitation, describing “a (gendered, racialized, ableist, and ageist) fantasy of art as vocation and devotion, a moral economy in which enthusiasm is the currency and payment appears vulgar.” Underpinning this fantasy is the idea of free, independent ownership over our bodies—their health, time and abilities—while, in actuality, our bodies and their (mis)uses are inseparable from class, race, gender, nationality and ethnicity. Devotion and vocation are placed on a pedestal, positioned snugly between love and passion, all upheld by economic necessity and the political structures that produce it.
Carro Sharkey: ‘Did4luv,’ 2026, Tanztage Berlin at Sophiensaele // Photo by Mayra Wallraff
With this backdrop in mind, the performance opens with a somber voice emerging from the pitch dark, asking “if today were the day you had to stop dancing, how would you feel?” A dim light shines in the left corner of the stage, and the ballad ‘What I Did For Love’—a melancholic and passionate closing piece from the 1975 Broadway musical ‘A Chorus Line’—begins. In the musical, this ballad responds to a dancer (unmetaphorically) breaking a leg, suddenly unable to perform. Highlighting the constant risk of collapse, the injury exposes the precarity of the performing arts, when both financial and emotional stability depend on something as vulnerable as the body’s expression. ‘What I Did For Love,’ originally an allusion to the sacrificial devotion to art, takes on a new meaning in ‘Did4luv’—one that invites the audience to take a closer look at “love” in the context of labor.
As the ballad finishes, a plush, bright red figure is slowly illuminated. Elmo stands before the audience: two white moons filled with black atop their head and a cavernous, upturned mouth. They dance whimsically toward the center to find an arrow sign, its front side reading “open4collaborations” and its backside “willdo4luv@gmail.com.” They lift it to their heart and begin to dance a sweet, graceful ballet, spinning the sign, lost in the kind of romance shared in a dance for two.
Their attention promptly shifts towards the audience, and they begin to capital-E Entertain. With energized, dramatic movements rooted in street dance sign spinning, they cross the stage from end to end—all acrobatics and theatrics and spinning and grooving—entertaining relentlessly, with an enthusiasm born from desperation. It’s the kind of action that, when sustained, can only lead to exhaustion.
Dominique McDougal: ‘Did4luv,’ 2026, Tanztage Berlin at Sophiensaele // Photo by Mayra Wallraff
They tire, breaking down to the floor and weeping in despair, only to stand again and resume the dance. Each time they lift themselves from the floor their ingenuity diminishes, and each time they fall their despondency grows stronger. Their movements devolve into strained, mechanical, desperate jerks, and they look as detached from their sign as they are dissociated from their dance. All the while, Elmo’s face beams maniacally.
The dancer frees themself from the cumbersome costume, revealing the defeated, saddened person beneath, desperate for a cigarette and some rest, a state not unfamiliar to many of us. The psychic wear of perseverance and performance is written across their face and body, sweaty and sunken into the side wall of the stage, disappearing into a cloud of vape smoke.
Dominique McDougal: ‘Did4luv,’ 2026, Tanztage Berlin at Sophiensaele // Photo by Mayra Wallraff
Rest, difficult to come by and often an impossibility for working artists, is experienced only briefly by the dancer before their next act, in which they’re suddenly approached by a rolling table and take on their new identity—a magician. In her essay ‘Body Friendly Dance Floors,’ published as part of the anniversary publication, Ana Vujanovic highlights the systems that often trap artists in cycles of constant work with limited rest, writing that “the tempo of applications, residencies, and short contracts ensures that rest becomes an expensive commodity. Wellness is of course necessary, but turned into mandate, it becomes another job that requires an investment of time and money.” Instability, coupled with scarcity of opportunity, creates conditions where in order to continuously entertain, sell and survive, the artist must be prepared to reinvent themselves at every turn.
Dominique McDougal: ‘Did4luv,’ 2026, Tanztage Berlin at Sophiensaele // Photo by Mayra Wallraff
The magician performs a series of magic tricks assisted by a mysterious helping hand hidden under the table. While the audience experiences the joy of surprise and amusement of comedy, the magician remains detached from their craft, occasionally mocking the audience for their fascination with the performance. The magician’s cynicism devolves into boredom as they enter their final act, removing their clothes and stepping into platformed stilettos with nonchalance. They whistle as they assemble their pole and begin to dance, emotionally and physically stripped bare and meeting the demands of the affective economy as they come.
Dominique McDougal: ‘Did4luv,’ 2026, Tanztage Berlin at Sophiensaele // Photo by Mayra Wallraff
‘Did4luv’ spirals from love and passion down through entertainment into palpable necessity, revealing the complexity of the interplay between devotion, exploitation and survival throughout. The incessant and varying demands of capitalist labor and entertainment industries—health, strength, creativity, desirability and ultimately perfection—not only frequently exceed our capacities, but treat our capacities as private responsibilities.
Wellness, rather than a collective, long-term pursuit, becomes a costly and inaccessible expectation necessary for economic survival. As Vujanovic writes, to release “art from social isolation and exclusive temporality,” we must shift our view of the body as a possession to the body as a relation, constituted by “other bodies and their time… held in place by caretakers and colleagues, by administrators who move deadlines, by publics who offer attention not as surveillance but as warmth.”
Festival Info
Tanztage Berlin
Closing Party: Saturday, Jan. 24; 10:30pm
Festival: Jan. 8-24, 2026
tanztage.sophiensaele.com
Sophienstraße 18, 10178 Berlin, click here for map
