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)

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)

William Forsythe’s

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)