Choreography: Gerhard Bohner [clip length: 1'12 min]

“Pictures at an Exhibition” by Gerhard Bohner presents a collage of different musical versions of Modest Mussorgysky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”. “Dancers in everyday clothes instead of ballet costumes, in street shoes, slippers, flippers or bare feet instead of slippers and pointe shoes, which are not completely banished because of that. Cardboard boxes, plates, umbrellas, life-size stick puppets or briefcases become co-actors on stage. The rooms – living spaces for stories, fates, characters and everyday occurrences. In “Pictures at an Exhibition” the room becomes a museum hall or a ballet hall, depending on how it is used – at the same time serving as a mirror for the psychic interior of a character haunted by nightmares.” (from the book: TanzTheaterGeschichte by Susanne Schlicher)

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Bohner, Gerhard

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Bremen Dance Theatre

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German Dance Theatre

Choreography: Henrietta Horn | clip length 1’40 min

Time, movements, sounds – the focus of “Blauzeit” is the question – How long are five minutes? – How long do we actually feel 5 minutes to be? These questions give rise to the contrast between slow and fast: movements and situations between slow-motion, stretched, deliberate, fast, abrupt or abrupt. In addition, a mysterious, cool atmosphere paired with austerity, directness and simultaneity. Cold colours: blue, grey, beige – window-climbing beetles crawling from a high glass wall – many question marks are hidden on the stage. Images and situations change abruptly, contrasted by the sounds of David Lang, which calm the piece. (Press office Folkwang Tanzstudio)

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Horn, Henrietta

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Folkwang Tanzstudio

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German Dance Theatre

Choreography: Reinhild Hoffmann | Clip length: 0’43 min

The dancer steps onto a white paper track for her aria. Rows and rows of men sink to the floor in front of this opera diva. She steps over them – quite a grand entrance, if it weren’t for her white shoes, previously dyed blood-red and which she put on only reluctantly, and if it weren’t for the second dancer in a short dress who interferes with her glamorous entrance again and again. Is she an unruly alter ego? A split-off part of her personality? In eight images of high theatrical intensity, Reinhild Hoffmann revisits the cult of the opera star and its abysses in her dance piece “Callas”, which premiered in 1983. The dancers, sometimes replaced by puppets, cardboard figures and plaster busts, show the glamour and misery of the opera business to the arias sung by Maria Callas. Neither the women trained by men are missing, nor the couple who arrive too late, have to look for their seats and push their way through the rows of seats. (Klaus Kieser)

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Hoffmann, Reinhild

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Bremen Dance Theatre

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German Dance Theatre

Choreography: Bohner, Gerhard | Clip length: 1’14 min

For me, the exciting thing about Bremen was the new beginning with a new generation of dancers. I had never worked with such young dancers before. Things were props that had become so important to me through my involvement with the Bauhaus and Schlemmer. It was impossible to estimate how endless it would become. There was an incredible amount of material that was put together like a collage according to the dance theatre principle. I had the feeling that each scene was incredibly important, and of course the time passed. The content was, if you want to put it fancy, a reification, not to lose the relation to things, which has become a problem in our century, after all.”

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Bohner, Gerhard

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Bremen Dance Theatre

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German Dance Theatre

Choreography: Johann Kresnik | Clip length: 0’51 min

Germany, in the second half of the 1960s: the father abuses his wife and children, the grandfather quotes the Bild newspaper and likes to saw up baby dolls, the grandmother suffers from a cleaning compulsion and tells of her escape from the Russians to the West. The son, born in 1950, also has to watch as new Wirtschaftswunderland houses are literally built from the excavated mass grave. He ends his young life with a jackhammer, the loud symbol of construction but also destruction. His funeral ends this “family dialogue” as a family photo; it began as a still from his parents’ silver wedding anniversary. Jackhammers thunder in music by Gustav Mahler, marches and contemporary hits resound. Johann Kresnik staged this family prison story in 1980, which ranges from the First World War to the crimes of the Second World War to the saturating post-war Germany, as a garish, loud, politically taking sides dance theatre. (Klaus Kieser)

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Kresnik, Johann

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Bremen Dance Theatre

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German Dance Theatre

Choreography:  Reinhild Hoffmann [clip length: 1'26 min]

The ballroom as a social microcosm, the dance floor a parquet for abysmal games between the sexes. Reinhild Hoffmann takes a sporting approach. In her production “Föhn”, developed and premiered in 1985 with the Bremer Tanztheater, boxing gloves and fencing masks are used – with bouffant-coloured dresses for the women and black suits for the men. A tango introduces the dancing pleasure. But soon they no longer adhere to the established codes of ballroom dancing. HoffmannsTanztheater provokes with erotic sensuality full of fantasy and absurd humour. At first it is the woman who has to let herself be tied up by a horde of men with nylon stockings. But the female sex is no less challenging and aggressive. A theatrical dance spectacle full of disturbances and injuries and poetic pictorial power. (Irmela Kästner)

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Hoffmann, Reinhild

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Bremen Dance Theatre

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German Dance Theatre

Choreography: Susanne Linke | clip length: 0’54 min

In 1980, “Im Bade wannen” marked the international breakthrough for Susanne Linke as a solo dancer – first of all in the toilet, from which the dancer rises in a flowing light-coloured dress and walks to an enamel bathtub. To music by Erik Satie, she progresses from the initially casual polishing and rapid rushing around the tub to a furious, almost ecstatic cleaning to a close, intimate duet with the tub, which she tilts and turns while balancing on the rim. Again and again she takes breaks, distances herself briefly as if sobered, but then returns to the object of her housewifely duties and libidinous feelings. At some point, the dancer sits in the tub to wipe the floor around it from the inside, she gymnastics out and in, keeps increasing until, in the absolute climax, she tips the tub onto its side. She crawls under it, comes out again and finally remains lying next to the tub. (Klaus Kieser)

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Linke, Susanne

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Folkwang Tanzstudio

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German Dance Theatre

Choreography: Urs Dietrich | Clip length: 1’31 min

In rapid succession, “persona”, which Urs Dietrich choreographed in 2003, creates an arc of images of human self-designs, behaviours and attempts to establish contact. These are sometimes extremely bizarre, for example when a dancer with ties hanging from his head like rabbit ears emits bird sounds, or three men carry a feather-light dancer and breathe their “I love you” in unison. They present themselves sexy and uninhibited, dreamy and introverted, dramatic and cool, silly and cheerful. A mix of lounge songs, world music and electronic sounds accompany them. Towards the end, tempo and intensity increase: through the central slit of the white back wall, the dancers appear one by one, run to the centre of the stage and there dance their further condensed individualising movements in a spot of light in the square until they are replaced by a colleague. This creates a diversity in rapid change, in which the breadth of variation of human existence appears. (Klaus Kieser)

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Dietrich, Urs

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Bremer Tanztheater

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German Dance Theatre

Choreography: Reinhild Hoffmann | Clip length: 0’54 min

A woman on the side of a sofa: the metre-long train of her light evening dress merges into the cover of the furniture. Her range of movement is determined by the fabric and the sofa, and the dancer cannot escape either, no matter how hard she tries. The “Solo mit Sofa”, which Reinhild Hoffmannchoreographed for herself in 1977, became a surprising success, which on the one hand referred back to the tradition of German expressive dance, on the other hand was influenced by American performance art. Created to music by John Cage, the solo abolishes the clear boundary between subject and object. It plays with the contours of the sofa when the performer – wrapped up like an oversized roll of fabric – lies in front of the furniture. And at the same time it thematises the sensitivities of a bound person who tries to get rid of her cloth shackles with calculation or in fierce anger. After about 15 minutes, the dancer takes up the fabric, folds it up and walks towards the sofa. (Klaus Kieser)

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Hoffmann, Reinhild

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Folkwang Tanzstudio

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German Dance Theatre

Choreography: Johann Kresnik | Clip length: 0’55 min

The play begins in the present, 1990, the year of the premiere of Johann Kresnik’schoreographic theatre “Ulrike Meinhof”. The protagonist, an elderly woman in a distinguished trench, walks through the trash of fast-food dishes. Soon a hamburger is forcibly stuffed into her mouth, she is coerced into participating in carnival polonaises. Arrived in reunified Germany. Three dancers are assigned Johann Kresnikthe role of Ulrike Meinhof, the terrorist who died in Stuttgart-Stammheim prison in 1976: the one in 1990 looks down on the one in the cell at the end of the first picture. After this panning shot, the stages of the life of the third Ulrike Meinhof take place, who first comes into view as a typing and agitating journalist. Klaus Rainer Röhl, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin appear on and in relation to Meinhof. In the last picture, called “Death and Transfiguration”, Ulrike Meinhof cuts off her tongue with a knife. Thus silenced, she is pressed between two glass plates. (Klaus Kieser)

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Kresnik, Johann

Institutions

Bremer Tanztheater

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German Dance Theatre

Choreography: Johann Kresnik | Clip length: 0’44 min

“Wendewut”, based on the story of the same name by Günter Gaus, takes stark pictures of the Stasi and the dissolution of the state, and of the supposed charity towards brothers and sisters in the other part of Germany. GDR border guards lead the audience along the red carpet to their seats. On the watchtowers, monitors show the test picture of GDR television. People in grey suits collect potatoes, pour them out again. The workers’ and farmers’ state creates its own employment. Until a chip-eating mob in dirndls and traditional costumes knocks on the dividing wall. – But then the madness really starts. (Irmela Kästner)

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Kresnik, Johann

Institutions

Bremer Tanztheater

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German Dance Theatre