Why are we dancing? And what is good for us? These are the central questions at the upcoming Dance Workshop Europe (TWE). And that this annual event is all about DIY is clearer than ever. At the press conference, TWE director Walter Heun brought two women onto the podium who were “only” invited to lead workshops this year. Ceren Oran, the city’s newly crowned and well-deserved dance sponsorship award winner, welcomes even amateurs under the motto “Just Dance”. Virginie Roy, dancer, psychologist and movement therapist, supports professionals in their stress and injury management.
Contemporary dance for everyone, TWE has taken that literally for more than 30 years, and so between August 2nd and 12th everyone can find an event that suits them. Whether he wants to try the movement repertoire of a Crystal Pite, get to know urban dance techniques or meet his body that has remained in lockdown again in a Feldenkrais course. And meeting again is the trump card – on the artistic-theoretical adventure course “and the beat goes on…”, which takes place on Sunday, August 7th with free admission in the temporary use project Fluffy Clouds (Belgradstraße 195, from 2 p.m.), where you can Experience a performance lying under a giant trampoline (Roza Moshtaghi “Bouncing Narratives”), try out various somatic practices, listen to the show-loving dance psychologist Peter Lovatt or have a picnic, but also in many of the invited pieces.
And like the need to get together again, these are also clearly shaped by the pandemic: by (re)considering the essentials, by flexibility and reduction. Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion, for example, descended into their archive and sought out and revived forgotten thoughts and materials from their thirty-year artistic association (“Rewriting & Science Fiction”, August 6, Schwere Reiter). Noé Soulier, who, according to Heun, attended the TWE Symposium for the first time as a philosophy student, opens the festival with a cinematic self-assurance and with “Passage”, a site-specific set of dance miniatures. What six dancers were doing in the Muffathalle on August 2nd was distributed throughout the city in Anger, where Soulier directs the renowned Center national de danse contemporaine.
There is strength in grounding: the Belgian choreographer Louise Vanneste will present her four-woman piece “Earths” on August 9th in the Muffathalle.
(Photo: Caroline Lessire)
Solos have also proven to be similarly adaptable in recent years, this time coming from the young Egyptian choreographer Salma Salem, who in “Anchoring” laments the tornness of the female body and celebrates the strength that it draws from its grounding (on 10. 8th in Mindfulness Double Bill with Marta Wołowiec’s “Tens”). A conviction that Louise Vanneste can probably seamlessly follow with her four-woman play “Earths”. But Isabelle Schad, winner of the German Dance Prize 2019, is also present with two solos and a duet, in which rotary movements and Aya Toraiwa’s very long hair are the focus. And Canadian “rock star of dance” Frédérick Gravel positions himself and his artistic skin against patriarchy and capitalism in “Fear and Greed” with only the support of a band.
Joe Moran in “Arrangement” and Alexander Vantournhout in “Through the Grapevine” also deal with masculinity. While Moran has six dancers queer gender clichés, his Brussels colleague’s pas de deux is about imperfect bodies and in the direction of nouveau cirque. Before both performances, physical introduction will take place for the first time at Tanzwerkstatt, and there will be audio description at Gravel. Contemporary dance is rarely served in a more approachable way.
Dance workshop Europe, Tuesday, August 2nd to Friday, August 12th, jointadventures.net/tanzwerkstatt-europa