tanzhaus nrw is leaving its own four walls and is breaking new ground: instead of inviting the audience into the auditorium into dance studios, various artists are boarding sites of care work and self-care in Düsseldorf. Artistic practices and reflection processes underwent a reality-check: the nursing home of the Diakonie Flingern, located in direct proximity of tanzhaus nrw, hosted Liz Rosenfeld and Rodrigo García Alves with their research on queer concepts of hospice (April/May 2018). The Zentrum Plus Friedrichsstadt, a meeting point in Düsseldorf’s inner city, welcomed Katja Heitmann to explore body algorithms (April/May 2018), and at Fitness Unlimited, the collective ZOO exercised active self-care (May/June 2018).
These places are contact points for people in search of community, care, service, or recreational activity. They are, in the broadest sense, places that are devoted to the dignity and care of human beings. In this way, art negotiates current social questions, like: how does “care work” and “affective work” look like today? And how do these processes transform artistic practices, institutions of art and their models of cooperation?
Next to the “residencies in the real,” which represent the heart of the project Claiming Common Spaces at tanzhaus nrw, further outside spaces in Düsseldorf were and are currently explored: Norwegian choreographer Ingri Fiksal summoned forest spirits at a secret location (May 2018), Sebastian Matthias, a choreographer from Berlin, moved through the grooves of most varied public spaces and institutions in Düsseldorf’s center with his audience (June 2018), and Franco-Moroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen, together with her exclusively female ensemble, reclaimed spaces as free spaces in her project “Corbeaux” (June/July 2018).