August 2026
Bat Dances
Bat Dances uses movement, sound and humor to portray the world from a bat’s perspective while highlighting similarities between humans and animals. The performance is designed to be equally engaging for sighted, blind, and visually impaired audiences.
How do different animal species perceive and experience the world — and how can dance contribute an answer to this question? In Bat Dances, Kareth Schaffer and composer Jonas Hauer create a work that offers an aesthetically coherent experience for seeing, blind, and visually impaired audiences. Their first collaboration is a danced monologue —or a radio play — from the perspective of a bat, cautiously juxtaposing its movement patterns to those of humans. With the solo performer Leah Katz, the use of echolocation, and gentle humour, they weave an interspecies fable that helps us to navigate the reality of environmental doom.
Parallel to the stage performance, Schaffer and Hauer produced a podcast, Bat Chats, to document the making of their show:
Artistic Co-Direction, Choreography: Kareth Schaffer | Artistic Co-Direction, Composition: Jonas Hauer | Dance, Performance: Leah Katz | Special Effects, Guest Performance: Sefa Okutan | Sound: Andrea Parolin | Costume: Anna Mirkin | Set: Dora Ðurkesac | Stage Set Sewing: Lux Ulonska | Light: Yair Vardi | Sound/ Media Composition Podcast: Phillip Kullen | Bat Tour: Christine Kuhnert | Outreach: Josephine Findeisen | Production Management: M.i.C.A. | Outside Eye: Dani Brown | Aerial Coaching: Liz Williams
Bat Dances is a production of Kareth Schaffer // Construction Company in co-production with Tanz im August / HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.
Special Thanks to: Ariane Jeßulat, Stiftung Naturschutz Berlin