The sports edition of the performance »On Horses« sends powerful narratives into the race. Two performers and a life-size wooden horse go all out between pony farm and hard dressage. It’s about the life and death of horses as sports equipment, about recreational fun and an interspecies (competitive) battle.

Eva Hintermaier | Simon Kalus are a transdisciplinary team at the interface of performance, installation and literature.

Samuel Hertz composes a series of playlists, atmospheres, background sounds and sound installations that inhabit and fill the multipurpose spaces of Sportsfest. These sound installations also include live streaming of sound from tournament events as well as incorporating interactivity on the parts of audiences and participants alike. They play with the sound associations of both sporting events proper, as well as the more hidden spaces within which they occur: locker rooms, loud gyms, training rooms and loud sports bars all influence the sound design and the ways in which these atmosphere both challenge and accept these unique environments.

Samuel Hertz is a sound artist and researcher who works with sound-sensing networks of environmental science research through multimedia frames including immersive electronic music, interstellar radio transmissions, deep sea broadcasts, and doom metal concerts.

Jasmin and Merle perform a 2-man artistic cycling freestyle. The program is divided into a part on two wheels and on one wheel. In the competition, they have five minutes to present their routine in front of a judging panel. The Spandauer Radsportverein 1891 e.V. is a club for indoor cycling (artistic cycling and unicycle freestyle). Training is offered up to 5 days a week in a sports hall in Spandau. The groups are mixed-age. Children and adults alike enjoy taking part.

»Softer Hards« build on functional training with artistic research inquiries into bodybuilding. For this purpose, varying bodyweight exercises from calisthenics and resistance training are combined with theorizing impulses and experimental creative reflexions.

The intention of these full body workouts is the strengthening of bodily power, control and image within their political context – and a cultivation of emancipatory bodily sensations in the process.

Sporting practice, critical engagement, and poetic sensitization intertwine to examine the dialectic links between the sociological, psychological, and physiological dimensions of functional training. The resulting boundary crossings serve as a pragmatic strategy for enacting social change, shaping new forms of knowing about one’s own body and spelling out queer perspectives on fitness cultures.

As a child he remembers first being drawn to the beautiful game, not by the game itself, but rather the colourful jerseys which the players wore. Using his football-dance practice as a departure point, Ahilan Ratnamohan now delves into this mystical connection to the sport, a connection which he slowly distanced himself from as he began to play more seriously, cataloguing the developments of fashion in football over the last 30 years. He zooms in on fabric and particular manners of wearing clothes, ruminating on what their possible effects are on the movements in football, literally and figuratively.

Ahilan Ratnamohan is a performance-maker based in Antwerp. He is inspired above all by sport and language-learning processes. His work straddles many different themes, aesthetics and contexts, from theatre to performance and choreography, international to hyper-local.

The immediate presence of violence has an indirect and direct effect on our bodies, our behavior and our perception of the world. In order to protect ourselves from violence, we attend self-defense courses and learn to fight for ourselves. Do I have to become dangerous to be safe? In the performance, we explore facets of self-defense – everyday protection rituals, fighting techniques, political and moral questions of defense.

Natasha Borenko and Lidiia Golovanova are non-binary theater makers with a migration background, living in Berlin and focusing on political participatory theater projects that deal with issues of gender, power and community through humor and theater of the absurd.

As part of the performance development, the artists will also conduct a self-defense workshop with a professional self-defense trainer:
Do. 5.6. 17:00-19:00FLINTA+ Selbstverteidigung (Workshop & Recherche)
please register to participate via email sport@ballhausost.de

Sports move people. Sports generate emotion. Sports turn spectators into fans. Ballhaus Odds has stood for safe sports betting since 2025. The Ballhaus Odds Group’s actions are based on three pillars: trust, tradition and passion.

Barbara Lenartz is a freelance artist, scenographer and costume designer; she lives in Berlin and runs a dog racing track in Tempelhof. Anton Rose works as an author, director, pop singer and is a fan of Andrasch Starke. Armin Luschin is a web developer and designer. He is passionate about betting on the Philippine Basketball League.

Only a few kilometers to go. The athletic director whips you forward. Lactate conquers your legs. The interactive cycling installation between race simulation and performance diagnostics turns the Smarttrainer into a storytelling machine.

Yves Regenass works as a theater creator at the interface of game theater and digital dramaturgy. He studied cultural studies and aesthetic practice, is a qualified athletics coach and has a track certificate from the Grenchen Velodrome.

The Berlin Bruisers are Germany’s first gay rugby team – and the worst team in terms of play far and wide!
»Tackling Life« is a rousing portrait of a team that sweats and celebrates, laughs and cries, wins and loses together. A movie against stereotypes and about the happiness of having finally found a community after a long search in which you can be who you really want to be.

Watch the trailer here.

In »Fake Diamonds« René*e returns to the dance floors of her past, to gyms, community halls and ballrooms. She dances with and against herself as a former dancer in the competitive sport of Latin American ballroom dancing. In the sparkling glow of fake diamonds, René and her team are now choreographing the old dances anew. With a queerfeminist dance performance, they question sexiste and racist structures in competitive dance, the heteronormative ideal of the romantic couple and binary ideas of winning and losing.

René*e Reith (all pronouns) works as a choreographer, performance artist and dance scholar.