an introduction
Even as child, it was clear to me that I could only understand the world through my feelings.
I was born in Wuppertal (Germany) in 1976. My mother was a housewife and my father worked as a dental technician. As a child, I played a lot by myself, which I loved. I especially liked running through the forest and building a little hut somewhere.
I had become interested in theatre at an early age. Actually, it all started with a church choir and with neighbours who came to my mother and said that I should take singing lessons. So began a long journey that brought me via Bayreuth, the city of Richard Wagner (Germany), Sydney (Australia), and finally to the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch back to Wuppertal. Before that I had studied theatre, film and television studies, musicology and classical archeology and wrote my doctoral thesis on the transgression of the aesthetic in an digital realm at the University of Cologne (Digitaler Alltag, Utz-Verlag, München 2012).
I worked as Assistant to Pina Bausch and after her passing as Research and Develoment Manager of the Pina Bausch Foundation (2009-2013). In 2014, I founded the International Research Center for Contemporary Arts and Applied Cultural Theory Ekeby (The Netherlands). I have worked as a producer, dramaturge, lecturer and director for dance, theatre and film throughout Europe and abroad.
Lately,I have been asking myself what has been the quintessence of all my activities in the arts over the last 20 years. Why am I still doing it? And what was the question underlying all these projects?
I came to the conclusion that it was my interest in the feeling of people Life Studies – Democratizing Aesthetics is the research field for this question: why do we feel the way we do?
Selected publications:
mAPs – The Power of Transformation. A Toolkit for Dance, Film and Social Change (eds. Wagenbach/TANZRAUSCHEN), Wuppertal: TANZRAUSCHEN 2023 – And so you see …: On the Situatedness of Translating Audience Perceptions, in: Michaela Ott/Thomas Weber (eds.), Situated in Translations. Bielefeld: transcript 2019, pp. 191-214 (with Gabriele Klein); Archive des Kolonialen. Übersetzungen kulturellen Erbes im Tanz, in: Knopf/Lembcke/Recklies (eds.): Archive dekolonialisieren, Bielefeld: transcript 2018, pp.191- 206; Inheriting Dance. An Invitation from Pina (eds. Wagenbach/Pina Bausch Foundation), Bielefeld: transcript 2014
MW 