BERLIN.- Gropius Bau is kicking off its spring programme on March 6 and 7 with a new commission by Berlin‑based artist and director Leila Hekmat.

Moving between concert, happening, ballet and collective dream, the performance Roses Rising—The Movement transforms Gropius Bau’s atrium into a rhythmic space, where desire collapses into action, politics into prayer and revolution into mime.

Where’s the unrest? Where’s the insanity? Where’s the music?

A group gathers. The lavish dinner that had just ignited their desire for dissent still reverberates among the self-indulgent women. Now they have become leaders. They have a following. They sing, rant, chant, preach, whirl, whisper, dance, burn incense and frolic with flowers. They want to know: Is this all there is to a revolution? And they want you to join: “Calling all of today’s new tribe of teenagers, turned-on children – teeny-boppers and adolescent hippies! Are you tired, rundown, listless? Do you feel the feelings? Corruptible minds and masses – help the helpless, hump the hopeless, heal the hapless.”

With meticulously handcrafted costumes and stage designs, Roses Rising unfolds in Leila Hekmat’s distinctive style, traversing comedy, musical tableau vivant and performance. Developed through extensive research and collected materials on 1970s protest cultures, the work emerges as a performative collage that explores the conscious and unconscious strategies through which people respond to a world in crisis.

Roses Rising is presented as a performance in two parts in collaboration with HAU Hebbel am Ufer. After The Movement at Gropius Bau, the stage production The Dinner will have its premiere at HAU1 on 15 April 2026. The Dinner explores the genesis of The Movement through staging the decadent dinner party that preceded the uprising.

Leila Hekmat is a Berlin-based artist whose work merges installation, performance, film and music into vivid tableaux of baroque satire. Through hand-crafted costumes and stage designs, she constructs worlds teeming with detail that subvert and play with social conventions and the constructions of sexuality and gender.

Her meticulous use of collage draws on historical references ranging from commedia dell’arte and vaudeville to 1970s protest and television cultures. With humour and excess, Hekmat’s works unravel the tangled follies of power, morality and desire.

As co‑curator of the last Spätschicht in 2025, she invited artists and collaborators to transform Gropius Bau's otherwise inaccessible areas into a stage.

Currently, Hekmat is working in one of the studios at Gropius Bau.

Roses Rising—The Movement is curated by Nora-Swantje Almes, Curator Live Programme and Outreach, with Alexandra Philippovskaya, Assistant Curator Live Programme and Outreach, and Edessa Malke, Curatorial Fellow Live Programme and Outreach.