What the Body Remembers. Dance Heritage Today The Century of Dance

Dance archives in Cologne, Leipzig, Bremen and Berlin are showing unique centrepieces from their collections in a joint exhibition for the first time.

Mary Wigman's Hexentanz (Witch Dance) mask, Valeska Gert's self-folded and retouched portrait photographs, admission tickets to the 1936 Olympic Games, Oskar Schlemmer's makeup instructions for his Triadic Ballet, the workbooks and stage direction books of Dore Hoyer and Johann Kresnik, and the notes to the Grünen Tisch show how dance has been safeguarded in the archives and preserved as an invaluable resource for the future. The history of resistance and engagement is told using Jean Weidt's masks as example; makeup artist Erich Goldstaub can be tracked to Ausschwitz, where he is lost without a trace.

Selected documents of Modern German Dance are placed into the context of a worldwide, international dance scene, which through projections of a hundred iconic photographs and film clips present themselves as a dynamic force field of body images and motion inventions in dialogue with the original objects.

Guided tours:
Mon – Sat 4 pm (from 1 Sep 2019)
Sun 3 pm