Marlen Pflueger

    Marlen Pflüger

    Dance Artist / Choreographer

    Marlen performing „The Game“ at Tate Modern, 2020

    Biography

    Marlen Pflüger is a Berlin-based freelance dancer, choreographer, somatic practitioner, teacher, and voice artist. Marlen explores movement and voice through an intersectional-feminist lens. She draws inspiration from pop culture characters, the cyborg, the archetype of witches and biblical characters and how their stories have influenced the construction of identities and their movement language throughout history. Through these contemporary, historical and sci-fi narratives, Marlen explores how social (and gendered) codes have been archived in our bodies and the potential of deconstructing them. Marlen uses her artistic practice to seductively ridicule and tenderly soften societal norms, to mirror the complexities of identity and to give space for experimentation, imagination and contrasts.

    Within Marlen’s movement and voice practice there lies a particular focus on both practicing and questioning the act of embodiment whilst generating a collective energy, that shifts between states of ease and high intensity.

    Marlen holds a Bachelor’s degree in Contemporary Dance from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where she co-founded the queer feminist art collective MassHysteria. Marlen completed additional training at Performact in Portugal. In 2022, she obtained her Diploma as a somatic practitioner in the Unfold/Alexander movement method by Valentina Bordenave in Berlin.

    She has collaborated with experimental artists such as Doris Uhlich, Dries Verhoeven, Rosanna Graf, Leah Marojevic, Katharina Senzenberger, Valentina Bordenave, Annabel Reid, Blitzbereit and Colette Sadler and has been employed as a choreographer by the Goethe Institut amongst other institutions.

    Marlen’s performances span across numerous venues internationally, most notably the Tate Modern Museum London, the Victoria and Albert Museum London, Ugly Duck London, P.A.R.T.S Brussels, Sophiensaele Berlin, Uferstudios Berlin, Brotfabrik Berlin, Tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf, Dampfzentrale Bern and Brakke Grond Amsterdam.

    Choreography

    love me in my dirt (2025)
    Trailer

    30 min., Galiläa Kirche, Paradise Must Be Nice Festival, Berlin

    Direction: Marlen Pflüger
    Sound: Caterina Gobbi (electronic) + Marlen Pflüger (voice)
    Costume: Rebecca Piersanti
    Performers: Willa Faulkner, Sophie Page, Marlen Pflüger, Lydia Walker, Rebecca Piersanti, Polina Sonis, and Anna Diesse
    Assistance: Josephine Auffray
    Photography: Milena Wojhan
    Cinematography: Dora Krylov
    Edit: Billy Leach

    𝓵𝓸𝓿𝓮 𝓶𝓮 𝓲𝓷 𝓶𝔂 𝓭𝓲𝓻𝓽 is an interdisciplinary dance, voice and music based performance where Masshysterians investigate themes such as desire, trance and disruption within the structure of a christian church. They meet for a ritualistic gathering, glitching a speculative landscape characterized by circularity, fluidity, darkness, obscurity, and nurturant qualities that fundamentally oppose linear structures. The performance is grounded in a somatic movement practice that explores the dialectical relationship between rootedness and displacement within the body, investigating how embodied knowledge can serve as a site of resistance to institutionalized binary thinking. The performers take the audience on an anxious ride deep into the hidden cracks of their forgotten parts. 


    MassHysteria is an experimental dance art collective formed of 12+ movement artists spread across Europe.
    Masshysterians move as a fluid body, layering movement with voice and sound, letting dance-based emotional processing play with experimental femme performance.


    Goddesses Dream When They Bleed (2025)
    Full Video
    Teaser

    50 min., Brakke Grond, Amsterdam

    Through the iconography of public wash houses and inspired by the ancestral gestures of women washing clothes (les lavandières), as well as the myths surrounding them, the performance explores the intimate relationship between women who reclaim their bodies, power and space. In a landscape shaped by clotheslines, white sheets, and sound devices, two bodies dive into the physical heaviness of domestic labour revealing repetition, rhythms and body states transformations. Washing, carrying and twisting clothes until they become a weapon.Through this interdisciplinary physical performance combining choreography, sound and space, Goddesses dream when they bleed invites us to radically reassess the role of female domestic work as a factor of emancipation and recognise the uncompensated labour of our mothers, grandmothers, the mothers of our grandmothers and those who came before them.

    Concept: Annabel Reid, Goda Žukauskaitė
    Performers: Annabel Reid, Marlen Pflüger
    Sound: Thibaut Langenais
    Light: Paulina Prokop
    Photography: Sjoerde Derine

    High Life (2025)
    Trailer
    Extract

    20 min., Spoiler, Berlin

    In this performance, Rosanna Graf and Marlen Pflüger appear as finance witches engaged in a continuous consultation for inexperienced brokers. While offering speculative investment advice on stocks and cryptocurrencies, they simultaneously perform a physical ritual for prosperity. They attune themselves to the spatial vibrations, collect energy, ride on broken branches, and conduct an egg-cleansing ritual on one another. The audience is encircled with salt, eggs are shattered, milk is poured. Finally, the two figures vanish. The work oscillates between financial language and symbolic gestures, exploring the intersections of belief, speculation, and the desire for security in uncertain systems.

    Concept/Performance: Marlen Pflüger, Rosanna Graf
    Duration: 30 min
    Photography: Lea Hopp

    i feel nothing (2024)
    Teaser

    Agidlab, Souto, Portugal

    i feel nothing explores the relationship between human bodies and power tools, reimagining machines beyond their utilitarian purpose. Drills, chainsaws, and other phallic tools become more than functional machines—they become extensions, music instruments, dance partners, counterparts in a shared choreography of sound and movement.Through live recording and distortion of the machines‘ sounds, the soundscape evolves in real time, shaped by the interaction with the tools.. i feel nothing offers new imaginaries of intimacy, violence, and the uncanny potential of bodies in motion with machines. Marlen and Eva lived for one month in a small, self-generating mountain village, to learn from the locals the use of machines.

    Concept: Marlen Pflüger
    Performers: Eva Weibel, Marlen Pflüger
    Sound: Caterina Gobbi

    Funded by Culture Moves Europe, Goethe Institut

    PUSSY WILLOW (2022-2023)
    Website

    30 min., Dofestival, Danzig (PO), P.A.R.T.S., Brussels (BE), Teater Albatross (SW), AdLibitum, Brussels (BE)

    PUSSY WILLOW is an ongoing performative exploration, a transformative webbing, between India de Vere and Marlen Pflüger into the contamination between feminine forces in nature – taking inspiration from the attitude of the Pussy Willow, which grows unapologetically and without self-censoring. Pussy Willow is an unapologetic diary to the mothering of feminine structures, in all its malleability and discourse. Supported by P.A.R.T.S. and Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation.

    Concept, Choreography, Performance: Marlen Pflüger and India deVere
    Pictures: Dawid Marzec

    BODIES OF CARE (2022)
    Website

    Performed online, GARCES Marseille, and Sophiensaele as part of Frequenzen Feminismen Berlin

    Bodies of care is a performing arts project that invites the public to actively participate in a performance created by ten young choreographers from Indonesia and Germany together with performance artists Melati Suryodarmo (Indonesia) and the media- and performance collective LIGNA (Germany). As the COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed our culture and gestures of caring about one another, this experimental project critically reviews our understanding and daily practices of care and community care. Responses to ever more urgent questions about care — who cares and who does not care for whom —vary in different local and global contexts.

    Choreography collaboration: Marlen Pflüger, Yasmina Lammler, Abdul Hadi
    Mentors: Melati Suryodarmo and LIGNA

    Produced and organized by The Goethe-Institut Indonesien and Sasikirana KoreoLAB & Dance Camp (Indonesia)

    2xGURKSLIPPI (2021-2022)

    Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, London (2021), GLIMPSES Festival by Blitzbereit, Berlin (2021), Bermondsey Project Space, London (2022)

    Gurklisspi are two alien creatures from a far away planet. Gurkslippi move and are being moved primarily through an extreme sensitivity of their skin. Gurkslippi are genderless. Gurkslippi like gurkens, and not only eating them. Gurkslippi embody the constant longing for connection and intimacy most humans carry deep inside. When Gurkslippi feel, they feel so deeply, the cracks of the earthskin starts vomiting. Gurklsippi were send to planet earth to remind the earthlings of the power of touch.

    2xGurkslippi is a performative installation, where Willa and Marlen use their bodies, voices, sounds and various materials to soften the bodies of the audience and invite them to join the sensational world of Gurklsippi.

    Concept and performance: Marlen Pflüger and Willa Faulkner

    YOU SKIN ME//I SKIN YOU (2021/2023)

    This video project captures carefully chosen images of a body practice Marlen Pflueger and Willa Faulkner have developed since 2019 during their dance studies. It was filmed in the countryside of Lisbon, Portugal, where they lived during Covid19.
    The main intention of the movement practice is to awaken the senses of the body through the skin. The practice comes from a queer feminist approach to shift the way we perceive the world from a representational point of view into a sensorial one. The video includes nudity.

    Practitioners: Marlen Pflüger and Willa Faulkner

    Filmed by Jo Marpot

    Screened at Bermondsey Project Space in London, 2021 and at le recreation in 2023, Paris

    NEVER SLEEP (2021)

    Never Sleep is a site specific performance, set in an abandoned farm in the outskirts of Lisbon, where the audience is led by the eyes of a camera through an awakening of peculiar stories.

    Exploring The thin line between reality and performance, this piece is inspired by Sleeping Beauty and different stages of waking up. An image waking up, a body waking up, a mind waking up, a fantasy waking up, a revolution waking up, a performance waking up, a life waking up. And then falling asleep again, because it’s all a bit much, isn’t it?
    The pieces was created during the first COVID pandemic, when NOT YET dance collective lived in Vimeiro. Marlen was inspired by every day encounters she observed of the individual collective members and wanted to capture the atmosphere; a dance between dream, fear, anxiety and beauty.

    Concept/Choreographie: Marlen Pflueger
    Performers : Romain Lutinier Blanchot, Rebecca Lång, Nitzan Shafran, Willa Faulkner, Yasmina Lammler, Jonas Marpot, Maxime Renaud
    Camera: Marlen Pflueger and Jonas Marpot

    Supported by Performact, Torres Verdas, Portugal

    YOGA IN THE PARK (2020)

    Resolutions Festival at the Place, London

    Through Yoga In The Park MassHysteria collectively approaches the concept of ‘hysteria’ as an act of liberation from the social constructs put upon the female body. The collective have developed a practice where they manipulate their bodies to transition between different physical states, allowing madness and the mundane to integrate and waltz together.

    Concept and Choreography: Willa Faulkner & Marlen Pflueger
    Creative direction Hannah Aebi
    Costume: Lydia Walker & Rebecca Piersanti
    Live sound: Monika Blaszczak
    Performers: MassHysteriaCollective

    WHO IS WENDY? (2019)

    Bonnie Bird Theatre and Lewisham Church, London

    Who Is Wendy explores the reappropriation of the female gaze and attempts to blow away its frames.
    „Your glaze between my shoulder blades. Was I moving the same way before you looked at me?
    Leaving my frame I realize its existence depends on your ability to see beyond.
    In the meantime I slip away underneath layers of breathing silk..“
    Marlen Pflüger

    Concept/Choreography: Marlen Pflueger
    Collaborators and performers: Willa Faulkner, Julia Kayser, Sophie Page, Rebecca Piersanti, Nina Richard
    Costume design: Lizzie Barker and Marlen Pflueger
    Lighting design: PJ Davy
    Sound score: Moments Of Sufficient Lucidity by James Leyland Kirby, Yesterday by Beautiful Swimmer; Field recording – mixed by Marlen Pflueger

    Supported by Trinity Laban Center for Contemporary Dance, London

    LIVING SKIN (2019)

    1 year independant research project for my Bachelor at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance

    Living Skin is a durational interdisciplinary performance installation and holds together four different performances, a collage of experiemces of the female and queer perceived body. It is site specific, set in female changing rooms of a dance University and includes nudity.
    The audience is free to enter and leave however long they please to.
    1) In the shower room, Marlen and Willa share their practice You skin me/I skin you, a movement research moving through the sensations of the skin.
    2) Going Shopping is displayed In the changing room, where every 15 minutes 3 different womxn sitting in shopping trolleys, get driven in and out if the changing room by an assistant.
    3) On the mirrors the movie Oma Käthe is screened, a projection screening the skin of Marlen’s grandmother on Marlen’s breasts.
    4) Dear Body, a selection of 50 letters written by womxn to their bodies, age between 14 and 74, hanging on clothe racks
    This performance is a tribute to our bodies.

    Choreography and concept: Marlen Pflueger
    Performer You skin me/I skin you: Willa Faulkner, Marlen Pflueger.

    Performer Going Shopping: Hannah Aebi, Jennifer Boultbee, Julia Kayser, Lydia Walker, Monika Błaszczak, Nina Richard, Rebecca Piersanti, Sophie Page.

    Performer Oma Käthe: Marlen Pflueger in collaboration with her grandmother Käthe Heisterkamp
    Filming: Marlen Pflueger in collaboration with Dror Sohet

    Lighting design: PJ Davy
    Sound: The sound of my skin -a collection of personal recordings
    Letter collection Dear Body: Female identifying friends and mothers
    Duration: One hour
    Site: Laban Center London

    Performance

    CLOUD CHAMBER (2023)
    Full video

    DOCK11, Berlin

    CLOUD CHAMBER is a mixed reality performance that uses VR with a specially designed software for to expand reality with 3D elements and an immersive multichannel surround sound system. Combining extended voice technology with somatic body performance and dance, the performance explores the issue of nuclear waste disposal and humanity’s relationship with nuclear energy and itself in the distant future. Supported by DOCK 11 digital.

    Concept, choreography, 3D, sound, music and performance: Harald Stojan
    Performers: Marlen Pflüger, Nicola Micaleff
    Creative technology & 3D: Bariş Pekcagliyan, Warja Rybakova, Irina Shutova
    Costume design: Nicolas Navarro Rueda
    Research support: Omi, Lavinia Vago

    THE TREES AND THEIR SECRETS (2023)
    Trailer

    The Trees and their Secrets is a free audio-immersive theatre-walk exploring trees, wildlife, and the environment. Featuring movement, clowning, puppetry, music, and poetry available in English, German or Turkish. Supported by Draußenstadt Berlin.

    Performers: Andrea Ariel, Claire Chaulet, India de Vere, Bridget Hines, Sri Lavanya, and Marlen Pflüger
    Text: Jemima Foxtrot
    Director: Jemima Foxtrot
    Composer/Sound Design: Joe Ackroyd
    Technician: Vladimir Rahzev
    Design: Bridget Hines
    Producers: Jemima Foxtrot and Bridget Hines
    Photo: Jason Krüger

    Supported by Draussenstadt Berlin

    SHATTERING AND HEALING (2022)

    Milan

    Shattering and Healing is an event of screenings and live performances exploring the tension between the individual and the collective as a circular dynamic, in which individual affective experiences and collective dimension oppose and imply each other at the same time. Through the works presented, this circular dynamic is represented as a continuous process of composition and recomposition, of shattering and healing.

    Curation: Felice Morano
    Presented by Demomovingimage
    Concept, Choreography, Performance: MassHysteria Collective
    Performers: Lydia Walker, Willa Faulkner, Rebecca Piersanti, Marlen Pflüger, Monika Blaszczak
    Sound video: Caterina Gobbi + Marlen Pfüger


    HABITAT (2022)
    Website

    Habitat is an utopia. A shameless but also a free-of-shame hymn to a naked body beyond cultural inscriptions and conventional ideals of beauty. The body is not devalued to the level of a fetish, an object; and carnality is neither metaphorically nor poetically ideologised but understood in a material sense and is therefore presented in all its mass and weight yet also in its fragility.

    Concept/Choreography: Doris Uhlich
    Performers: 75 people age 19-70 (more info on website)
    Rehearsal directors: Katharina Senk & Mim Schneider
    DJ: Boris Kopeinig
    Light design: Sergio Pessanha
    Photo: Jean-Luc Woodman

    ABGENABELT (2021-2022)
    Trailer

    ISC Bern (CH), TANZhAUS Bern (CH), Brotfabrik Berlin (DE)

    abgenabelt is a performance that explores social norms and expectations of women* – with the aim of breaking free from them. The premiere took place at the ISC Bern in October 2021. In 2022, the piece was restaged at TANZhAUS Bern and Brotfabrik Berlin. The project was supported by Bureau Logos Ltd, Burgergemeinde Bern, ISC Bern, Mobiliar, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Pierino Ambrosoli Foundation, Schweizer Interpretenstiftung, Kultur Stadt Bern, Kulturförderung Kanton Bern, Xocolat Fribourg, Zunft zu Ober-Gerwern.

    Concept, Choreography, Performance: Eva Weibel & Lou Steiger Sounddesign
    Performance: Marlen Pflüger
    Assistance: Alvise Lindenberger & Jakob Sambeth
    Photos: Fabian Brügger
    Video: Laura Hänni

    MassHysteria presents: THE GAME (2020)

    The Tate Modern, London

    Concept and performance: MassHysteriaCollective
    Video work: Romain Biros, Helena Berjemo, Dror Shohet
    Garments: Marie Leuder
    Garments (Welcoming Female Fantasy): Krystal Paniahua
    Styling: Lily Mcmurray
    Live sound: Zinzi Fauci
    Photography: Dror Shohet

    A raw presentation and sharing of MassHysteria collective at Tate Exchange, as they transform the 5th Floor of Tate Modern into their studio, invited by Laura Woods. The day weaves through the theme ‘power’, with “games”, impromptu solo explorations and video works, accompanied by an evolving live set from DJ and their friend, Zinzi Fauci. Premieres of short dance works by collective members, Hannah Aebi and Monika Blaszczak, and an open discussion surrounding female power led by Gitta Wigro, follows.
    The collective welcomes the audience into movement exploration as a connection to self, togetherness, pleasure and play. ‘MassHysteriaPresents: The Game’ sensitively immerses you into the empowerment of physical expression.

    1-800-LONGING4IT (2021-2022)
    Website
    Article

    WhatYouSee Festival and Present Futures Digital

    1-800-LONGING4IT is a late-night, 1 on 1 live performance held over the phone. In a time when disembodied intimacy and loneliness soar across our present into the foreseeable, this work appropriates the format of phone sex hotlines and personal ads in one-on-one night time performances. The encounters comprise of fictional fantasies that serve to queer normative power roles, to prioritise care, pleasure and dreaming, to momentarily release performer and audience from reality. Problematising how virtual connection and female bodies are consumed, suspended within the imaginative space between two bodies.

    Concept/Choreography: Leah Marojevic
    Performers: Marlen Pflüger, Monika Blaszczak, Nina Richard, Julia Kayser, Sophie Page, Jennifer Boultbee, Lydia Walker, Willa Faulkner, Kathie Serridge, Willa Faulkner, Domenic Baker, Rebecca Piersanti, Hannah Aebi
    Art works: JAME ST. FINDLAY

    Supported by Arts Council England

    Choreography/,