Curtain up
deufert&plischke revisited

Before their first joint performance in 2001 at the ZKM in Karlsruhe: “How to Knit Your Own Political Body”

25.08.2026

Dance is not a mute, subsidiary form of theater; it is the highlight of every celebration. This realization at the turn of the millennium and the enthusiasm of theater for dance have become a couple. This couple has a name: the artist twins deufert&plischke.

When Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke invite you over, be sure to bring a toothbrush. Their celebrations can easily run three days. What matters to them is art’s capacity to form communities, to conjure cohesion, and to create synergies with everyone who attends. To celebrate. To learn. And to dance.

For 25 years the two have been a pair of twins, a germ cell of what can be set in motion through one another. Dance is not a choreographic masterpiece, but an art form that doesn’t hold the audience at a distance but carries it along into the history of dance as much as into the radical present of social togetherness.

Dance is not theater. Dance is a celebration. With this statement, the pair establish a dangerous proximity to social movements and to togetherness as the original form of human resilience. They fill a gap without competition by competing with no one. It’s a story that begins in Brussels in 2001, and starts all over again 25 years later in South Africa. A story that thoroughly upends dance’s relationship with its supposed sole employer, theater.

top: “KonSequenzen”; right: “P.I.P.”

Lilo Nein & Martina Nowak