Line Dance mit Angela Merkt

Zum Auftakt des Festivals werden an den Bahnhöfen aller drei Städte Line Dance Flashmobs stattfinden. Immer am Vortag des Festivalstarts der jeweiligen Stadt wird um 17:30 Uhr mit Angela Merkt Line Dance geübt.

Es sind keine Vorkenntnisse notwendig. Kommt vorbei und schwingt mit uns das Tanzbein!

Mehr über Angela Merkt 

Seit ihrer frühen Kindheit fasziniert sie der Tanz in allen Facetten. Ihr Weg führte sie vom Ballett zum zeitgenössischen Tanz, zu Hip Hop, Paartanz und zum Linedance. Sie ist außerdem zertifizierte Lehrerin für Alexander-Technik und verbindet heute sehr erfolgreich diese Methode mit ihrem Tanzunterricht.

Linedance verbindet Elemente aus Ballroom Dance und anderen Tanzrichtungen. Getanzt werden kurze Choreographien in Reihen vor- und nebeneinander. Die Musik dazu ist vielfältig. Swing, Latin, Pop, Country oder Walzer. Linedance fördert Koordination und Balance. Und das Beste: Es macht so viel Spaß!

Credits Photos: Philip Sichler

Dangers are an inevitable part of life. Either deliberately, by chance or through the actions of others, we are repeatedly exposed to forces that can endanger body and soul. In her solo dance piece ‘Wenn es plötzlich still wird’ (“When a sudden silence falls”), the choreographer and film-maker Zoë Schreckenberg finds inspiration in the sombre and intense atmosphere of horror adventure computer games like ‘The Last of Us’.

She transforms this material into a dynamic dance: brutal fighting moves take on the hypnotic fascination of repeated choreography. Here Schreckenberg is mainly interested in the abstract representation of the aggressive movement forms used in combat. A physical opponent remains absent. As a result, the choreography is able to concentrate on essentials, while also opening up a space that blurs the boundaries between the self and the world, reality and fantasy.

Inspired by the works of the German painter and object artist Peter Roehr, the dancers of the Hessisches Staatsballett transform Kunsthaus Wiesbaden into a stage and create a unique dance event.

Free entry

Photo: Patrick Bäuml

The international waacking icon and choreographer of “STUCK” Mounia Nassanger gives an insight into the movement language of waacking/whacking and its history on the US West Coast in the 1970s.

While voguing has its roots in New York, waacking emerged on the West coast of the USA, in Los Angeles, as the dance of the LGBTQ disco scene in the 70s – in a period when queer people were largely unseen and stigmatised.

An extension of punking (a positive use of the derogatory term “punk”), this expressive style was typified by accentuated arm movements to the beat of the music. With STUCK, international waacking icon Mounia Nassangar creates her first choreographic work, transposing the movement language of waacking into a personal and idiosyncratic contemporary stage work. Here she searches for answers to physical and mental blocks. Dance becomes a tool that transforms internal and external pressures into freedom and self-determination.

In STUCK, five female dancers each take their own highly individual approaches to waacking. While their bodies and histories are different, they all share one powerful experience: the immediacy of dance and expression that is capable of resisting all forms of oppression.

‘Avessos’ (“inside out“) is the new work by the Brazilian dancer and choreographer Marcos Abranches – currently Artist-in-Residence at Staatstheater Darmstadt. For this solo performance he explores the most varied styles and artistic forms including DanceAbility, butoh, contact improvisation, cinema, photography, fashion, music and somatic techniques like Feldenkrais.

DanceAbility is a method of dance, movement and non-verbal communcation. It integrates people with and without disabilities and is based on the principle of inclusion instead of isolation.

Japanese butoh is a dance that upsets conventions. Butoh aims to free itself from accustomed forms of physicality and thinking and to achieve a new kind of presence through improvisation and embodiment. Contact improvisation focusses, among other things, on transferring weight: on holding and being held.

‘Avessos’ invites its audience to enter a kaleidoscope of expressive forms and to experience a poignant solo.

On Sunday, 10.11. a “Meet the Artists” takes place after the performance.

Two women are eating sunflower seeds in a park, a doorway or a courtyard. They share an everyday space, a conversation and the intimacy of silence. Suddenly singing and dancing interrupt this normal world and transform it into a magical spectacle.

In ‘Taranto Aleatorio’ (“Random Taranto”) the choreographer and dancer María del Mar Suárez/La Chachi and the singer Lola Dolores offer their personal take on the roughness of taranto, a form of flamenco. It is a variety of dance that originated in the Adalucian mining region of Almería. It is accompanied by a simple, dry song without guitar accompaniment that was developed from its need to be sung independently.

Both artists adopt the principle of chance in the piece and create a good-humoured atmosphere with their unabashed gestures. Their choreography moves smoothly from easy to swirling movements in which their heels create a laughing, plaintive rhythm on the floor as the space is enveloped in a song that never wants to end.

In ‘A BEGINNING’, five dancers and singers take to the stage in darkness. Sparingly illuminated with hand-held lights, their songs flood the space.

For the artists Aurora Bauzà and Pere Jou, light becomes an object that reveals more about voices than bodies. Meanwhile the darkness encourages the public to use their imagination and to notice what is felt but not seen.

In this piece Bauzà and Jou have developed a practice of physicality and movement that displays two movements in a single body: the movement in the singing that is audible and the movements that are visible.

At the same time, the darkness alters our sense of space and time. The boundaries between the bodies of the performers and those of the public become blurred: the piece turns into a journey and theatrical story about the eternal dialectic between the individual and the collective, between movement and voice, darkness and light.

A Warm-up will take place in the foyer of Kammerspiele before the performance (19:00 Uhr) as well as a “Meet the Artists” after the show.

Language: Rumanian, English, Latin