At a time when we live with fear and insecurity and we as a society no longer have a connection to our bodies, we want to explore the interplay between ‘trauma and the body’. I would like to incorporate my research into my future work as a dance teacher and choreographer and also develop techniques that help to process trauma. Together with my dance partner, I investigated during the residency how the body reacts to stressful situations or trauma in order to find ways to process this stress in a healthy way through movement. We find that dance is the ideal medium for rebalancing the body through movement and music, and during our residency we created the first approaches to combining dance and trauma work. Our residency time consisted of book research, personal experience reports, breathing exercises and artistic exploration of the topic. After our working week in Potsdam, we were able to develop initial approaches and also create a small piece of choreography. The time we spent together helped me to pursue my research idea more concretely and also to create an approach for my future work.

‘Boiling Frogs’ is a choreographic investigation into climate change that uses the body to compose an image of future global and local catastrophe.

This project works with the decentralised places of the country and tries to relate to the stories and events in order to understand how the place we live in and its perception shapes us as a society.

Following our collaboration with tanz weit draussen, we are interested in continuing to work with local organisations in the different villages, with the aim of raising awareness and empathy for the importance of our ecology and the way it builds our bodies and our society.

As part of the tanz weit draussen scholarship, I was able to do a one-week residency at the inclusive dance company Szene2wei. During this time, me and another scholarship holder were able to accompany the rehearsals with the dance company.

We were immediately welcomed with open arms and a very warm welcome. The rehearsals were, somewhat surprisingly for me, just like any other rehearsal. I have to admit that I was a little apprehensive about the dancers at first. After the first rehearsal, these had largely disappeared.

Dancers with special needs certainly have other strengths and weaknesses, but as soon as you realise this, the work itself is the same as any other dance production. During the residency, the work became more and more natural for me, from loading the wheelchair into the car to joint duets. Working on an equal footing, just as one would wish from other dance companies.

The Body in Resistance project examines and analyses the development of the human body’s resistance in times of displacement and hardship through choreography. We observe and interpret the experiences of migrants who have to leave their countries for climatic, warlike or political reasons because the conditions for the development of society are no longer given. How the body resists dangerous travelling conditions, camping at the borders and police violence. This residency allowed us to observe and explore choreographic materials that interpret the culture of these migrant bodies and their support mechanisms. It gave us the opportunity to recognise the need to further deepen the research methods and the composition of choreographic works that are an invitation to the critical thinking of the decentralised audience in the country that is currently experiencing refugee peoples hosted in their places due to current disasters.

For me as a choreographer, it was a very enriching experience to take up the multiple task performance as a working method in Ponderosa. Especially in the initial phase of this research, it was of great importance to put my theme into practice within the trio and to understand how it can unfold there over time and take on clearer forms. I am now more fascinated than ever by the challenging possibilities that arise from the simultaneous realisation of several tasks with movement, music and image.

For Momo Fujita Tanner, Nils Röhner and myself, the time at Ponderosa was wonderful, because our rehearsal days were very positively fuelled by the proximity to nature, the opportunity to work in different studios, indoors and outdoors, and the daily exchange with the other artists around us.

During the residency, I wanted to find out where dance can be shown and how I can meet people who feel enriched by dance. I used the studio for training and preparation in the mornings and showed the piece ‘SHE is everywhere’ at a different location in Cottbus and the surrounding area in the afternoons.

The result was that dance itself ‘works’ well in public spaces. Dance attracts attention, moves a place, impresses in the moment and leaves a mark. People were mesmerised and stayed for a long time afterwards to talk and exchange ideas. The piece was ideal for this research. It is short, addresses a topic that many people identify with and leaves room for the inclusion of local conditions in the neighbourhood and their sound collage. It was easily accessible for the audience, without admission or registration. But for people to come and see artists they don’t know, you need structures, people or organisations on site that have a sufficient network and can provide information accordingly.

‘You are you, but you are also me.’ That is the topic of my work. Through the medium of the body, I have tried to create a ‘dialogue beyond dialogue’ that transcends the boundary between the moment, me and you. In June, I performed four participatory, improvised live performances in Cottbus, in which I used movement, fabric, sound, voice, dance and drawing. Each time there were many new discoveries.

On the last day, I gave a 3-4 hour workshop for the students of the Department of Architecture at the University of Brandenburg. In the first half of the workshop I gave my own solo performance and gradually involved the participants by giving them paper, touching them, using my voice and wrapping them with fabric, and in the second half they started to move more actively with the colours and the fabric. In the end, they were able to actively participate in the work and experience a new dialogue that went one step further.