ENSEMBLEFEST Berlin 2026

AUTUMN LEAVES is a joint project by MAM.manufaktur für aktuelle musik and the music theater company Nico and the Navigators, in collaboration with residents of a housing project for refugees run by Volkssolidarität in Treptow-Köpenick.
The work is based on a sheet of paper containing music by the American composer Terry Riley, who became the founding father of minimal music with his 1964 composition „In C“. „Autumn Leaves“ was composed around the same time as „In C", but has only been performed a handful of times in the U.S.
For the Berlin Ensemblefestival, MAM and Nico and the Navigators bring Riley’s *Autumn Leaves* to the European continent for the first time, in the form of a performative music installation developed in collaboration with an ensemble of young performers.

„Autumn Leaves“ follows an open structure in which rule and freedom, repetition and change constantly intertwine. This gives rise to a musical-theatrical experimental arrangement in which the familiar boundaries between music, movement, and perception begin to dissolve. Musicians become dancers, listeners become participants, sounds into gestures, and gestures into sounds. What usually appears separate converges in a shared space of experience.

On Alfred-Scholz-Platz in the heart of Neukölln, a landscape of sounds, objects, words, and people takes shape, within which the audience can move freely: without a fixed perspective or a privileged vantage point. Proximity and distance, activity and contemplation, the individual and the community constantly switch roles. Together with the falling maple leaves from the surrounding trees, a cycle of becoming and passing unfolds, in which transience is experienced not as a loss but as a condition of all renewal: In repetition, the other emerges; in the fleeting, the enduring.
Terry Riley’s music penetrates the body—and invites us to relate to the world differently for a moment.