Baby don’t cry

In this work in progress, dancer and choreographer Toschkin Schalnich opens up a space for a subject that affects many people yet is rarely made visible: loss before life, grief kept hidden, and moving forward after a rupture for which there are hardly any words.

Drawing on his own biography, Toschkin moves between urban dance forms and contemporary movement language. His physical practice is shaped by breaking, improvisation, and refined body control—a language that does not explain, but makes things tangible.

In this work, he uses the body as a carrier of memory, fragility, and resilience. Movement becomes a means of enduring the unspeakable and giving it form.

The starting point of the piece is a personal tragedy: the loss of a child through stillbirth. Rather than walking this path alone, Toschkin consciously places himself in the public eye—not to provide answers, but to allow questions to emerge. “How do we grieve?” “What remains unspoken?” And “why is it so difficult for us to talk about loss, even though so many are affected by it?”

This solo is not conceived as a finished choreography, but as a process—an artistic approach that leaves room for breaks, silence, and incompleteness. Dance, music, and lighting are used sparingly and adapt to the respective space. At the center stands the human being on stage—vulnerable, present, searching.

A special part of the evening is the conscious opening toward the audience. After the performance, space is created for exchange: a conversation, questions, thoughts, or even silence. The audience is invited—if they wish—to share, to reflect on their own experiences, or simply to listen.

This encounter is not an obligation, but an offer. An attempt to turn the theater into a place of sharing and connection.

With this work, Toschkin seeks not only personal processing, but also to make visible how widespread experiences of loss and grief are—and how relieving conversations about them can be. The piece symbolically gives a stage to those “little angels” who never had the chance to become visible, without explaining or defining them.

This open-stage evening is therefore both invitation and experiment: an encounter between art and life, between stage and auditorium. A moment of pause that shows that vulnerability is not a weakness, but a connecting element—one that can bring us closer together.