Joachim Schlömer, born in 1962, who originally came from dance theatre, has meanwhile created or directed more than 80 choreographies, operas and plays. He studied architecture and dance at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, where he also began choreographing.

In 1988 he danced at the La Monnaie Theatre in Brussels, Belgium. Two years later he founded his own company. From 1991, he directed the ballet at the Ulm Theatre, moving to the Tanztheater Weimar in 1994.

From 1996 he took over the direction of the Tanztheater Basel, where he began to dissolve the boundaries between dance, opera and drama. Mikhail Baryschnikov commissioned him to create three choreographies for his White Oak Dance Project.

Since 2001, Schlömer has worked as a freelance choreographer and director – for the Salzburg Festival and the Burgtheater Vienna, Austria, for the Staatstheater Cologne and for the Stuttgart Opera House.

Among his best-known plays are “Und in der Ferne die Nacht” to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, “Hochland oder Der Nachhall der Steine” and “La Guerra d’Amore” to music by Claudio Monteverdi.

 

(Gabriele Wittmann)

Gisela Peters-Rohse was born in 1938 and received her professional dance training at Lola Rogge’s modern dance school in Hamburg. She danced at several German city theatres and in parallel trained in a wide variety of dance techniques throughout Europe.

Since 1967 she worked together with her husband Kurt Peters, the founder of the German Dance Archive Cologne, as a dance journalist, especially for the monthly issues of “Das Tanzarchiv”.

From 1970, she was head of the children’s ballet department and the pedagogical seminar for children’s dance at the Rheinische Musikschule, Konservatorium der Stadt Köln. From 1986-2001, she was a lecturer in Laban’s Spatial and Movement Theory, Improvisation and Folk Dance, and Children’s Dance Pedagogy at the Institute for Stage Dance at the Cologne University of Music and Dance.

In addition to her pedagogical work, she became known for many remarkable choreographies for children and developed her own teaching concept and methodology, which she has been teaching for about 10 years at the invitation of various educational institutions in Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, Singapore, Brazil and Switzerland.

 

(Press office Peters-Rohse)

Irina Pauls, born in Leipzig in 1961, received her dance training at the Palucca Schule Dresden. She then studied choreography at the “Hans Otto” Theatre Academy in Leipzig. In 1985-89 she was engaged as ballet master and choreographer at the Landestheater Altenburg.

In 1990 she took over the direction of the newly founded Tanztheater at Schauspiel Leipzig, for which she created a total of 15 world premieres until its dissolution in 1998. She created guest choreographies for companies of other theatres, such as Schauspiel Essen, Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar and Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel Munich.

In 1998-99 she was director of the Dance Theatre at the Staatstheater Oldenburg. She also created free works for non-theatrical spaces, including for the Grassi Museum and the Glass Hall of the Neue Messe in Leipzig.

Since the 2000/01 season, she has directed the TanzTheater Irina Pauls company at the Theater Heidelberg.

 

(Press department Pauls)

Humorous, largely abstract, highly musical and deeply rooted in philosophy: a tricky, playful postmodern vocabulary characterises the work of choreographer Amanda Miller, who was born in 1986 from William Forsythe’s Frankfurt company.

Born in 1962 in Chapel Hill, USA, she studied classical and modern dance in her home region at the North Carolina School of Arts and later in New York. She then danced in companies such as the Chicago Lyrical Ballet. In 1980 she came to Germany for an engagement at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. In 1984 she moved to Frankfurt, where she became choreographer in residence after only two years. In 1992 she founded her company “Pretty Ugly”.

She worked freelance until she and her company entered into a cooperation agreement with the Staatstheater Freiburg in 1997 – a cooperation that was considered a model for new directions in dance production in Germany at the time.

With works such as “Four for Nothing”, Miller toured Europe, America, India and Japan.

 

(Gabriele Wittmann)

Circling a bathtub, running her hand along the rim, bending her back in a wide arc alternately back and forth: with solos like “In the bathtub” , Susanne Linke became one of the most prominent representatives of the German Dance Theatre.

Born in 1944, she studied with Mary Wigman in Berlin and at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, danced at the Folkwang Tanzstudio and at the Rotterdamse Dans Center. Together with Reinhild Hoffmann she directed the Folkwang Tanzstudio.

In 1970, she had started choreographing and toured extensively since 1981, with solo works like “Flut” and with group pieces like “Ruhr-Ort”. She choreographed pieces for the José Limón Company in New York, for the Paris Opera Ballet and for the Nederlands Dans Theater.

From 1994 to 2000 she directed the Bremer Tanztheater, partly in cooperation with Urs Dietrich. In 1999 she created together with Reinhild Hoffmann the duet “Über Kreuz”, in which both revealed the origins of their respective movement languages. Today she choreographs and teaches freelance all over the world.

 

(Gabriele Wittmann)

Throwing the body into the fight: A quote from Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini declared choreographer Johann Kresnik his motto.

Starting his career in the 1970s, he soon rose to become one of the leading choreographers in German dance theatre with works of highly symbolic, politically motivated, physically demanding weighty body language.

Born in Austria in 1939, he studied theatre and dance until his first engagement in Bremen in 1959. In 1960 he was engaged as a dancer in Cologne, where he danced repertoire by George Balanchine or John Cranko until 1968. In 1968 he was appointed director of the Bremen Dance Ensemble, where he created pieces such as “War Instructions for Everyman” or his own version of “Swan Lake”, set in the world of brutal capitalist competition, in the wake of the war in Vietnam. From 1979 he directed the dance theatre in Heidelberg, where he choreographed his first pieces based on biographies, for example “Sylvia Plath”.

Back in Bremen from 1989, he created masterpieces there such as his work on the German terrorist “Ulrike Meinhof”. In 1994 he moved to the Volksbühne Berlin. Since 2003 he has worked with his ensemble at the Staatstheater Bonn. So far he has created over 30 choreographies.

 

(Gabriele Wittmann)

Since the 1990s Anna Huber has developed her very specific choreographic language. Fragile yet with extreme clarity, she moves between levels of meaning, for example in her piece “in zwischen räumen”.

Born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1965, she studied dance at the ch-tanztheater from 1985 to 1988. For three years she worked as a dancer in Switzerland, Germany and Austria and for the Tanztheater Cottbus. Later she danced with choreographers such as Susanne Linke, Julyen Hamilton, Kazuo Ohno, Mark Tompkins, Saburo Teshigawara, Meg Stuart, Jo Fabian and Helena Waldmann. Today she works in Switzerland and Berlin, mainly developing solos and duets such as “Beizeiten”, dancing with and against the rough stone façade of a thermal bath or meeting the Taiwanese dancer Lin Yuan Shang in “L’autre et moi” in search of common and non-common places.

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Her pieces have been shown throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. She has received numerous awards. In 1998 she was named Young Choreographer of the Year by the magazine “ballet-tanz” and in 2000 she received the Hans Reinhart Ring, Switzerland’s highest theatre award.

 

(Gabriele Wittmann)

In a mixture of modern expressive dance and folkloristic elements, choreographer Henrietta Horn combines a wide spectrum: Her sombre “Solo” shows loneliness, table and chair are the only partners. Her amusing “The Rooster is Dead” is a revue with video montages.

Born in 1968, her first training from 1987 to 1992 included mainly so-called “elementary dance” at the Sports University in Cologne. A dance group emerged from her studies, with which she developed her first choreographies. From 1992 to 1996 she continued her studies at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen. Meanwhile, she continued to create her own works. In 1999 she was appointed co-director of the Folkwang Tanzstudio, together with Pina Bausch.

She has toured in Germany and internationally, drawing inspiration from countries like India and Brazil. European folklore largely informs her early piece “Diu Vallende Suht”, which revolves around the St Vitus dance, showing the dancers in a state of apparent loss of control over the movement of their limbs.

One of her best-known pieces is “Auftaucher”, in which the dancers combine and vary movements much like musicians in a jazz improvisation.

 

(Gabriele Wittmann)

The performance in her “Solo with Sofa”, in a long evening dress, tied to a couch, made Reinhild Hoffmann one of the most important choreographers in German dance theatre in 1977.

Born in 1943, she began studying at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen in 1965. Kurt Jooss and Jean Cébron were among her teachers. In 1970 she danced in the ensemble of Johann Kresnik at the Theater Bremen. In 1974 she started as co-director of the Folkwang Tanzstudio, together with Susanne Linke to choreograph herself.

In 1977 she went to New York to study choreography, returning the following year to become director of the Bremer Tanztheater, at times together with Gerhard Bohner, to take over. She stayed in Bremen for eight years, choreographing on the side for her own company, with which she also went on tour.

Four times during the 1980s she was invited to the most important theatre festival in Germany, the Berlin Theatertreffen, and had thus achieved a quality in dance that until then only the famous Pina Bausch. For almost a decade she went to Bochum with her ensemble in 1986. She has been awarded numerous prizes for her work.

Since 1996 she has been choreographing and directing mainly operas.

 

(Gabriele Wittmann)

After training as an actor and dancer in Buenos Aires and attending numerous master classes, Argentinean Daniel Goldin, born in 1959, came to Germany in 1987. He became a member of the Folkwang Tanzstudio and danced as a guest with Tanztheater Wuppertal (under the direction of Pina Bausch).

Between 1993 and 1996 Daniel Goldin worked as a freelance dancer and choreographer and has been the dance theatre director of the Städtische Bühnen Münster since the 96/97 season. Daniel Goldin began his choreographic career in 1982.

Goldin’s work identifies him as a border crosser between cultures: his choreographies are influenced by his South American origins, his Ukrainian-Jewish ancestry and his work in Germany.

His style is essentially influenced by German expression dance, which he learned about through Mary Wigman student Renate Schottelius in Argentina. Through his studies at the Folkwang Tanzstudio he expanded his stylistic repertoire to include the unmistakable Folkwang style. His body language has something deeply human about it, expressing sensations and states of mind in all naturalness.

 

(Goldin Press Office)