SATURDAY, 29 JUNE 2024
"Future Dance" | 11 a.m. | Opera House | free offer
The festival is an invitation to experience the art form of ballet in all its facets, to be moved, to move and to enter into a discourse on what ballet was, is and can be.
The two panel events on 23 and 29 June 2024 are dedicated to these questions.
Under the title "Future of Dance", we will address the question of how the art form of dance, and classical ballet in particular, can remain viable for the future. Discuss with us!
Parts of this event will be held in English.
Our guests: Prof. Dr. Sevi Bayraktar, Louis Stiens
Prof. Dr. Sevi Bayraktar is Professor of Dance, Music and Performance in Global Contexts at the Centre for Contemporary Dance at the Cologne University of Music and Dance. As a dancer and dance scholar, she specialises in social choreographies, the politics of heritagisation and critical studies of gender and diaspora at the intersection of theory and practice. Her methodology combines dance ethnography and choreographic research. She holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Louis Stiens comes from Munich. He completed his dance training at the Heinz Bosl Foundation and the John Cranko School in Stuttgart. He has been a member of the Stuttgart Ballet since 2011, where he was promoted to semi-soloist for the 2015/2016 season. Louis Stiens has also been active as a choreographer for a long time. In 2012, he created the world premiere of "Dancer in the Dark" as a co-production between Schauspiel Stuttgart and the Stuttgart Ballet, for which Stiens created the choreography together with Marco Goecke. He has created a total of seven commissioned works for the Stuttgart Ballet. Louis Stiens was the choreographer for "Die sieben Todsünden / Seven Heavenly Sins" by Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht and Peaches as a co-production between the Stuttgart State Opera, Stuttgart Ballet and Schauspiel Stuttgart. In January 2023, his first choreography for Ballett Zürich entitled "Tal" premiered. Louis Stiens has been working as a freelance choreographer since the 2022/23 season.
Dr. Gustavo Fijalkow completed his dance training after the Teatro San Martín (Buenos Aires), the Folkwang Hochschule (Essen) and at the Rotterdamse Dansacademie (Rotterdam) and worked internationally as a dancer for many years. He was creative producer of the first professional mixed-abled dance company in Germany for ten years and has initiated and directed international, collaborative dance projects. He has curated interdisciplinary festivals and conceptualised meetings and conferences. He wrote his M.A. at CIAM / Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln on the production of national narratives through the programme of national cultural institutes and his PhD at the Centre for Dance Research / Coventry University on national dance platforms and body representations in the globalised system of contemporary dance. He has been artistic project director of the FORWARD DANCE COMPANY of LOFFT - DAS THEATER since its foundation. In addition to the artistic questioning of aesthetic models, an important focus of the company's work is on bodies in 'lieux de mémoire'.