Dance Techniques 2010

8
Foreword
Hortensia Völckers
Foreword
What do we know when we dance? When we asked this question at the first
Dance Congress Germany (Tanzkongress Deutschland) in 2006, 1700 people
came to Berlin in search of answers. The next time we ran the conference
(concurrently with the Tanzplan Deutschland initiative), the number of participating
dancers, choreographers, teachers, critics, scholars, producers, and
cultural politicians doubled. The Dance Congress Germany was established
as an international platform for professional exchange.
When launching Tanzplan Deutschland in 2005, our goals at the German
Federal Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung des Bundes) were to make dance
more visible to the public and to increase its cultural–political recognition.
With a 12.5 million Euro budget, this five–year funding program provided a
national platform for dance practitioners to network; it gave them space and
ensured that (cultural) politicians would listen to them.
Tanzplan local offered nine cities an opportunity to access equal shares
of funding based upon plans submitted for improving dance in their region.
Since then, more than four-hundred artists have taken advantage of a residency
in Potsdam where they conduct research prior to staging a production;
over the past years, several thousand young people and children were introduced
to the aesthetics and various contemporary dance techniques in cooperation
with partners from education and culture in Düsseldorf; and, there is
now a dance center in Hamburg where up–and–coming choreographers can
test themselves in a residency program. The city of Hamburg’s budget for
independent dance projects has finally been decoupled from the theater sector,
and increased. Pioneering structures have been created everywhere—in
Essen, Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin, Bremen, and Dresden.
Another main thrust of the initiative was Tanzplan Deutschland’s Educational
Program, which aimed to integrate the next generation of dancers,
choreographers, and scholars. Ideas came, again, from various cities and thus
the original plan for a mobile academy took a different direction: universities
founded study programs that innovatively coupled artistic–scholarly research
with professional vocational training. In cooperation with the independent