Zufit Simon's The Fight Club Opens Hanover's Best OFF Festival with Raw Masculine Energy
Rhythmic walking, staccato breathing, pumping arms, and clenched fists—watching the four performers in the rehearsal videos for The Fight Club, you recognize many familiar movements from the repertoire of choreographer Zufit Simon. The same goes for the poses—suddenly struck yet capable of slow transformation—and the electronic music by Fredrik Olofsson, laced with distorted voices. Still, Simon's latest piece, which will open the Best OFF Festival for Independent Theater (founded by the Lower Saxony Foundation) in Hanover on April 23, breaks new ground.
While Simon's work has long centered on women and performers read as female, this third exploration of physical protest and resistance shifts decisively toward combat and masculine posturing.
Her first piece on a similar theme, Radical Cheerleading, won the Best OFF Festival Prize in 2024—the very reason she is opening this year's edition. Born in Israel in 1980, Simon has lived in Germany for 25 years. From the start, Dietrich Oberländer's artblau Tanzwerkstatt in Braunschweig supported and produced her work.
In 2016, the Lower Saxony Ministry of Art and Culture cut conceptual funding; in 2024, the LOT Theater—where many of her pieces premiered—closed due to insolvency. "The loss of this infrastructure, vital not just for me but for the entire independent scene, is a severe blow to planning security and support," Simon says.
Her artistic roots lie in Munich, but the impact of these setbacks is cushioned by her long-standing practice of working across a Munich-Braunschweig-Berlin triangle, moving with her "big backpack" between co-producers and fellow artistic "combatants" in each city.
Simon first took the stage in Munich in 2002, performing in Tower of Babel by Company CobosMika. She proved her presence in works by Sabine Glenz and Micha Purucker and premiered nearly all her own pieces there. In 2025, at 45, she received the Munich Dance Award for Lifetime Achievement. In his laudation, Purucker praised her fearlessness and "unrented mind." The author of this text also delivered an homage to her life and work at the time.
Zufit Simon's pieces exude a certain coolness without ever feeling sterile. They reject dance-as-storytelling, shun decoration, and—channeling Brecht—refuse to indulge in romantic spectacle. Yet their formal rigor never smothers a joy in movement. Her choreography is like a dish from molecular gastronomy: a distilled essence where the full flavor of each ingredient remains intact. And those ingredients are wildly diverse.
A few years ago, Simon described her own work as defined by "sharply contoured movements," "intensity," and "dry humor." She had just completed her Emotion Trilogy—three pieces dissecting the relationship between feeling and body, from NEVER THE LESS to all about nothing to piece of something. The trilogy inched toward what had long seemed closed off in her work: facial expression—often mechanically exaggerated, teeth bared, clashing with the stated mood or switched on like a light.
Her art thrives on subverting expectations and sowing confusion—"first in myself, then in the audience." Perhaps this inclination was fate: her Hebrew name, Zufit, means hummingbird. Yet Simon herself is tall, with nothing of the tiny, fluttering creature about her. A reserved person, she calls herself "shy" and "dry" and always keeps a moment to herself.
She began dancing at four, training first in classical ballet before studying contemporary dance at the University of Music and Performing Arts Frankfurt. Early on, her choreographic voice garnered acclaim. Her first solo, fleischlos (meatless), won third prize for Best German Dance Solo at euroscene Leipzig in 2005. In 2008, Meine Mischpuche (My Mischief) premiered at Tanz im August in Berlin, a piece in which three dancers navigated a minefield of hundreds of eggs.
What followed were countless repetitive tasks—unexpected alliances between speakers, microphones, and hyperkinetic body parts—alongside a flurry of festival invitations. But Zufit Simon's gaze has always extended far beyond her own artistic bubble, whether through her advocacy for others or her years collaborating with director Moritz Schönecker at Theaterhaus Jena.
Since becoming a mother, Simon's engagement with feminist themes has deepened, as has her appetite for experimentation. Her 2019 solo Foams (Schäume) introduced unchoreographed elements, vocal work, and technical distortion effects. In 2020, Strange Foreign Bodies marked a deliberate shift: she began working with performers "who bring different mentalities, backgrounds, and bodies" to the stage—and for the first time, she presented those bodies naked. Including her own, since Simon always performs alongside her ensemble.
This fiercely independent movement researcher sees all her works as fragments of a single, potentially "endless" artistic act—a perspective most evident in her series. With Radical Cheerleading (2023), she drew on the activist traditions of U.S. feminists who weaponized the stereotypes of classic cheerleading—short skirts, flowing hair, perpetual smiles—to open the door to queer and other forms of protest.
The pom-pom-studded, most vibrantly colorful piece yet from this anti-theatrical artist has been a runaway success. In it, Simon geometrically "pacifies" the "sexy" cliché, exhausting herself through repetition as she did in her 2012 solo Wild Thing—the work that first earned her an invitation to Germany's Tanzplattform. Here, for the first time, she applies her choreographic scalpel not just to movement but to slogans, reassembling the parts with care to ensure that even gestures as loaded as raised fists resist reductive interpretation.
Zufit Simon has little interest in the unambiguous. In Bodies in Rebellion—the second installment of her resistance series—she doesn't depict specific protests in a specific country. Instead, she crafts a kind of glossary of abstracted expressions of the political body, unfolding with deliberate slowness onstage. The spectrum ranges from gestures of passive resistance to revolutionary self-empowerment and even paramilitary seizures of power.
The Fight Club may narrow the movement vocabulary further. The idea struck her while picking up her children from judo at a boxing gym: "What kind of spectacle ends only when someone is on the ground and can't get up? What mindset does that require?"—her first questions.
In the video, the display of power and strength tips into unintentional absurdity. The poses are stripped down, minimal. But one can bet there will be layers—disorienting, thought-provoking layers. After all, Simon's specialty is crafting "twists" that transform mainstream behaviors into something unsettling and defiantly unclassifiable.
