The disheveled hoard as dance ensemble and the random mess as set are ubiquitous now in experimental dance, but Berlin got there first. If the three-week Tanz Im August is any measure, the subversive city is also ahead of the curve with the scruff aesthetic’s more heartfelt and real-world version 2.0. Now the dancers belong to the kind of collectives offstage that they form onstage, and the set has come to resemble a hellscape. At Tanz Im August, you have many dystopias to choose from, though it’s less the worldview than the tight focus that distinguishes a handful of the 20 shows. After the rap star Milly Rock sued a video game company for using “his” move, Basil-based, Brooklyn-born Jeremy Nedd has reclaimed it for The People, or at least the quartet of dancers in rock to rock … aka how magnolia was taken for granite. For Some Thing Folk, with Stockholm’s renowned Cullberg troupe, the peripatetic New Yorker Ligia Lewis imagines Aleksei German’s beautiful, grotesque speculative-cum-medieval feature film as a gluey, gropey dance. The latest tough, sophisticated, semi-narrative ensemble work from Belfast’s Oona Doherty is inspired by her great-great-grandfather, slaughterhouse worker Specky Clark. Also on my shortlist: Brazilian Lia Rodrigues’s timely and appropriately bipolar Borda (Borders); Bergen-based Barcelonan Daniel Mariblanca’s naked solo metamorphosis, 71BODIES 1DANCE, in which the dance and the 71 bodies are trans; and Moritz Ostruschnjak’s “swipes” through TikTok memes and viral video clips for Trailer Park, a spirited, gestural, and densely packed piece for the ensemble tanzmainz. —Apollinaire Scherr