Fokus Tanz

This year, FOKUS TANZ will once again present stage productions, residency showings, workshops, and a battle between international and local choreographers who explore dance as a political, collaborative, and cultural medium. They open up new perspectives and illustrate that choreographic practice can be a space for critical reflection that enables new narratives, communities, and visions of the future. The focus is on works that understand the body as an emotional and cultural resonance space and negotiate questions of identity, transformation, and belonging. Between Afrofuturistic visions, hybrid narrative forms, and the renegotiation of tradition and modernity, the artists create choreographies in which anger, healing, and empowerment can be experienced.

Focus Tanz opens with Eun-Me Ahn's latest work, POST-ORIENTALIST EXPRESS, in which she and eight dancers create an impressive and visually opulent evening that transcends the contrasts between tradition and modernity and redefines them. The award-winning production BLKDOG by Botis Seva and his company Far From the Norm is a powerful composition of hip-hop choreography, music, text, and light. It combines physical strength with emotional depth, addresses the complex connection between self-discovery and self-destruction, and gives space to the fundamental need for acceptance. In [GN-z33/6°], BENSON A'KUYIE explores Afrofuturist imagination and the physical exploration of anger, identity, and healing. Experiences of isolation, alienation, and pent-up anger are transformed into an intense, ritualistic field of movement in which krump, voice, and memory intertwine and new futures can emerge. In addition, ABÎMES, the new work by Linda Hayford, celebrates its German premiere and, together with six outstanding dancers, creates a mystical space in which reality and fiction merge. With the aesthetics of shifting pop, metamorphosis becomes a means of storytelling to create an organic, forward-looking, and collective connection.