Bēton

In her latest creation Bēton, choreographer and dancer Bahar Temiz invites you into a dance performance where rooms, houses, roads, and cities rise and collapse in a search for shelter amid instability. A choreography of belonging in an age of destruction and displacement.

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This performance marks the third chapter in an ongoing series where Temiz and her collaborators explore the poetry of materials through dance, text, object and space. Voiced through the stories of South Pole explorers and braided into rope sculptures, Ice was a meditation on fragility of a vanishing past and an uncertain future. In Punkt, balloon explorers and early aerial photographs by Nadar offered shifting perspectives – altitude revealing not only distance, but also abyss. Now, Bēton turns to concrete: a material of contradiction – born of earth’s raw elements – gravel, sand, air, water – yet unsustainable, non-recyclable. Always present, always smaller. Never gone. Temiz dismantles the myth of concrete's permanence that begins in fluidity. Every movement draws out tension: between holding on and letting go, between the illusion of safety and the reality of precarity. Bēton reflects on urgent questions in a world where homes are lost daily – to war, to climate disasters, fire, flood, earthquakes, money and bureaucracy.

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Concrete offers a promise of protection and refuge. But what makes a house a home? Is it the concrete shell – or the things we gather inside? The pillow on which our childhood head laid at nights? What do we carry with us when we flee in a heartbeat? What would we keep carrying if we weren’t coming back? What is lost when home becomes a memory, a door that cannot be reopened? Who do we let in, and who do we shut out? What does it mean to belong when borders close, when languages estrange, when documents fail, when cities are erased? When the world around us crumbles, what remains of home? What remains of hope-when all else seems to fall apart? Concrete, more than a material of modernity, becomes a metaphor for the world we construct - with its privileged insides and hostile outsides.

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Things, rhythmically accumulate, 

one by one, fill the house 

and make it a home. 

Letters dissipate, as the language, 

we would lose on the way,

as we are torn from home.

We can never return if we’ve already left 

For there is no longer

a place like home.

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Temiz carries the memory of home as a pillow—soft, nurturing, and heavy with meaning. Like the caryatids of ancient Greece, the body bears the weight of architecture. Around her, blocks shift as cities in ruin or rebirth. While Pol Matthé, a long-time collaborator from Zee, Ice and Punkt, shapes the scenography and light, Azertyklavierwerke's musical soundscape flows through her spoken word—lullabies that sometimes soothe and comfort, sometimes unsettle and call to resist the numbness of perpetual crisis. Temiz moves between the cyclical and the linear, between falling and rising, between being heard and being silenced. Bēton is an invitation to active dreaming—to ask again what it means to live together, to consider who is welcome and who is left at the threshold. At a time when home is no longer a place for so many – but a memory, a battleground, or a dream – Bēton makes space for the body that refuses to vanish. For a language that bends and stretches. For music that travels beyond meaning and concrete walls.