tanz.dance is the journalistic project in order to describe critically and with relish movement, thus change, thus the future in the global arts. Made by well-researched reports in a gripping style with bilingual storytelling by international authors.
The comprehensive overview for dance companies and enthusiasts between the Mediterranean and the North Cape, between Irish and Lithuanian adventures—with real bodies for real bodies. Here is the constantly updated overview of dance festivals in Europe and its neighbors. Click on the country you want to travel to, select the month you want to visit it, and off you go.
Ljuzem Madiljin is the artistic director of the Tjimur Dance Theatre in Taiwan. Rather than marketing her culture as mere folklore for tourism, she uses modern art as a powerful statement. Ahead of her performances in Dresden and Hamburg, this article explores how she shoulders the responsibility for an entire mountain village and resists the gaze of outsiders.
Hillel Kogan, a renowned Israeli choreographer, is driven by his art of storytelling to conduct a precise analysis of the region’s armed conflicts. For this, he chose the Israel Museum in Jerusalem – the very site intended to give the Jewish people an identity. Through dance and the exhibits, he demonstrates that this identity does not exist.
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Conflicts can be discussed. Or they can be danced out. Bodies often say more about how we feel than arguments do. And they say a lot about this island shared by Ireland and the UK. An artificial border separates Irish people from Irish people. Choreographer Dylan Quinn elevates it to art.
It’s spring in the Alps. Temperatures are rising, the sun is shining down mercilessly after the snowstorm. Three hundred people on skis, in airplanes, in snow groomers, on motocross bikes, and dancers on foot, are all waiting to cross the Alps like Hannibal once did. There is a sense of danger in the air. A state of emergency?
Trajal Harrell from New York works like an explorer. Just as Alexander von Humboldt once explored various cultures across the globe, Harrell seeks out the dances of modernity – voguing, Butoh, Black America. The world is now rewarding him for his endeavors with monographic shows and world tours.
Kyoto is – along with Osaka – the centre of classical Japanese arts. Traditions here are passed down from generation to generation, primarily through individuals who hold the status of “living national treasures”. Like Inoue Yashiyo V, the fifth teacher in a sequence of a dance called Kyomai
Oh how the word shimmers: Lazgi. In French it sounds like “lascar,” a sly fellow. It puts us in mind of the word lasciviousness, or Lascaux for the more historically minded – of the cave paintings left behind by prehistoric humans. It was also the discovery of prehistoric rock paintings that saw the Central Asian Lazgi declared one of the oldest dances still practiced today.
Uprisings in Iran come in waves. Again and again. But for the first time, women are dancing in the streets. The country banned them from dancing in 1979. Their headscarf, the hijab, falls. Their hands grab it like a flag in defiance. They set it on fire. Iran is in turmoil – a turmoil born out of hunger for food and freedom in a state that keeps its henchmen and inspectors alive with bureaucratic diligence. And its executioners.
In just ten years, Florentina Holzinger has appeared like a shooting star and then captured her own place in the night sky of European contemporary dance. Wherever she and her all-female troupe of dancers appear, they literally steal the breath away from their audience.
A shadow hangs over Namibia–– and not just because of the low-hanging sun over the picturesque Etosha salt pan. Despite all the romanticism surrounding the desert, peace remains elusive even in the wake of the return of the looted artworks to the former German colony. The relationship with those who erected the first German concentration camps is anything but resolved.
Rituals, Elders, Ancestors and lots of land in the Canadian West. Contemporary Indigenous dance is reviving in the Coast Salish Territories. In 1886, the urban settlement of Vancouver was founded here, the inhabitants were displaced. But now the wind is changing.
A mighty festival on the island of Ingøy in northernmost Norway unites audiences and dancers under Arctic skies. Not far from the Russian border, the theatre is celebrating the landscape. Among us: Hans-Thies Lehmann, the late doyen of post-dramatic theatre. For him, landscape was both the adversary and the centre of theatre. A festive description and a last text by him.
The most artistically successful ballet company in the world currently hails from Marseille. Anyone can attend the rehearsals of the Ballet National de Marseille, even the administrative staff. Headed by a three-person collective, this giant company captures the spirit of the times in its productions. Covering everything from Lucinda Childs to Georgian folk dances, the (LA)HORDE collective invites everyone to enjoy dance again.
With its roots submerged in time, nothing is remoter to our Western sensibilities than Indian dance. What’s more, statues of naked female dancers at Karnataka’s temples attract those tourists who yearn to look at bayadères, those Hindu dancers that have been denigrated as prostitutes. In truth, Indian dance is undergoing a continuous reconstruction derived from innumerable fragments of a history spanning centuries. Choreographer Padmini Chettur has embraced this task with great sensitivity.
They call themselves Sorbs and Wends. Strangers often only notice their existence in Germany’s easternmost region when they see the bilingual town signs that come into view as soon as they cross the rolling hills into this other culture. Here, people defend themselves against the loss of self-will with vigorous dances – both old and new.
Modernism would be inconceivable without the interplay of inspiration and appropriation, any by implication the global groove of art, dance, performance, and protest. From a historical perspective, the German expressionist painter Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) was from an early stage enthusiastic not only about non-European cultures, but also for dance. This very intersection was precisely where the avant-garde found its starting point: in movements from elsewhere.
Hong Kong belongs to China. New laws, including those aimed at containing the virus, are not making it any easier for the city to find its way into its still-new role. This is also the case for the dance scene. So is the dance scene: the departure on the one hand, the attempt to go new ways and to break with traditions on the other.
Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in Africa and indeed the world. Despite a recent military coup, it is the venue for a dance festival that allows guests to gain deep insights into the mentalities of the African dance scene. On stage, people argue, dance, and forge new partnerships. Europe has funded this festival – so that it may approach the scene on an equal footing.
On 12 September 2018, 20 dancers of the Antwerp-based company Troubleyn published an open letter in the Flemish digital art magazine Rekto:Verso accusing the founder and artistic director, Jan Fabre, of having created a misogynistic atmosphere in which: “Humiliation is daily bread in and around the rehearsal space of Troubleyn.
Given my fascination with spirits, I kept asking myself how can we still get to know this endangered species that represent the oldest vision of humanity? Given my fascination with spirits, I kept asking myself how can we still get to know this endangered species that represent the oldest vision of humanity? At best, they are considered as revenants who cavort in virtual reality, in comics, in painting, and on stage, because they embody that yearning to make contact with the beyond.
Millions and millions of kilometers of yarn are unwound unremittingly from bobbins worldwide – in the myriad textile and sewing factories on this earth. Mechanically speaking, bobbins perform an almost endless pirouette. The human body follows exactly the same principle.
Theaters like to be the good guys in three ways: Good for the citizen. Good for culture. And good for the zeitgeist. Being good is part of the essence of theaters; they do not want to be accused of being racist. But does this fit the reality within the institution itself? The case of Raphael Moussa Hillebrand casts doubt on this.
tanz.dance is the journalistic project in order to describe critically and with relish movement, thus change, thus the future in the global arts. Made by well-researched reports in a gripping style with bilingual storytelling by international authors.
