Current Board of Directors
Anika Bendel (Dancer and Producer, Spaeker for Dancersconnect)
Margrit Bischof (Dance Researcher and Teacher, Member of the Association of Dance Science (Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung - gtf)
Sabine Gehm (Artistic Director festival TANZ Bremen)
Nina Hümpel (Journalist, tanznetz.de)
Helge Letonja (freelance Choreographer, steptext dance project)
Guido Markowitz (Choreographer and Artistic Director of the Ballet Company Theater Pforzheim)
Juliane Raschel (Project Coordinator Tanzplattform Rhein-Main)
Anika Bendel (Dancer and Producer)
Anika Bendel is a freelance dancer and producer in Stuttgart and Cologne. She works with emerging artists and established companies such as MOUVOIR/Stephanie Thiersch, DIN A 13 tanzcompany, MIRA performance, Helena Waldmann and others. What drives me is the desire to bring dance and the people who practice and facilitate it more into the center of society. For me, this includes more visibility and accessibility of dance events, and especially the improvement of the social situation of dance practitioners.
I bring the perspective of dancers and cultural producers into the work of the umbrella organization. With dancersconnect, I have an agile network of dancers behind me, which comprehensively represents the different creative contexts - fixed and free - and the internationality of our industry. I stand up for a young generation of committed artists who are fully determined to participate in cultural policy.
Margrit Bischof
Margrit Bischof is committed to a multifaceted networking of research, education and art in dance and is enthusiastic about a lively art scene as well as the intangible cultural heritage of dance. As a lecturer in dance at the University of Bern, she was responsible for teaching and research in the field of dance. She initiated a variety of national and international conferences on dance topics and directed the university dance group Paranoimia. She designed the university continuing education course DAS/MAS TanzKultur at the University of Bern and directed it from 2002 - 2015. She published in the field of dance pedagogy, dance research, dance education. She was president of the German-speaking Commission for Theater and Dance of the Canton of Bern. She has been associated with the Society for Dance Research since its foundation in the 1980s and was 1st chair from 2015-2019. She is currently chairing the commission kulturerbe,tanz! and received a prize from Kulturerbe Tanz Schweiz with this project from the BAK (Federal Office of Culture) in 2018.
Main content areas I am committed to within the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland:
- Networking dance knowledge with dance art: evaluation of TANZPAKT projects and other funding projects such as DIS TANZ START, exchange opportunities at symposia.
- Giving dance knowledge more visibility: Projects in collaboration with dance archives and dance journalism, using the example of Tanzwissen mobil, currently video installation "Tanz erzählt" (Dance tells), collaboration with AG Tanz Digitalisierung (Dance Digitization Working Group)
- Strengthening the educational aspects of dance: jury participation in DIS-TANZEN-IMPULS
- Various questions about ethics in dance (collaboration with ethics working group), preparations for the start of an ethics commission on behalf of the DTD
- Support of current and new projects of the office
Sabine Gehm
Sabine Gehm is artistic director of the international festival TANZ Bremen, freelance curator, dramaturge and cultural manager. Decades of work in various cities, projects and constellations in the field of dance and performance provided me with a wealth of experience in many respects, which I would like to contribute to the umbrella organization.
Due to my program research in Germany and abroad, my international networks, and through my several years of voluntary work as chair of the board of trustees of the Fonds Darstellende Künste (Performing Arts Fund), I am constantly gaining up-to-date insights into the national and international dance work of artists. In addition, as a long-time festival director, curator, coordinator, project manager, jury member, applicant and consultant, I am familiar with the day-to-day work of performing arts projects from a variety of perspectives. Especially as an artistic director, I see myself as a host not only for invited artists or speakers, but also for spectators or participants, as well as a mediator or moderator between art, politics and the public.
Nina Hümpel
Nina Hümpel has been the editor of www.tanznetz.de, an internet community for artistic stage dance in the German-speaking world, since 1996. Since 2012 she has been the Artistic Director of the Biennale DANCE, the International Festival for Contemporary Dance of the State Capital Munich, Germany.
Nina Hümpel was a jury member of the Bavarian State Association for Contemporary Dance, the Dance Jury of the City of Munich and the Jury for the Cultural Honorary Award of the City of Munich as well as a jury member of the Fund for Performing Arts in Berlin, for the program Kreativtransfer and for the German Dance Award of the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland. She is a member of the initiative Access to Dance - Tanzplan München, which is committed to improving access for contemporary dance in the city with a wide-ranging network.
As a founding and board member of Tanz.Media, she would like to strengthen her commitment to the future of dance journalism and dance archives in the digital space within the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland. Likewise, her focus is on ethical and climate-friendly curating in an international context. Her credo for the board, however, is to always keep dance as a whole in mind. Only through cohesion can this unique art of dance receive the recognition it deserves in society as a whole.
Helge Letonja
Helge Letonja is a choreographer, festival and project developer, dance producer, organizer, and lecturer, and has been the artistic director and managing director of steptext dance project Bremen for over 20 years. After his training in classical and contemporary dance, his international career as a dancer took him to the Bremen Tanztheater with Susanne Linke, among others. There he founded steptext in 1996 as a freelance company and has since choreographed around 40 dance pieces presented in Germany and abroad. In 2003 he was one of the concept developers and founders of the Schwankhalle Bremen. He is involved in a wide range of institutional and artistic collaborations for the regional and international development of dance, opening it up as a mediator of cultural diversity, social participation, interdisciplinary art and research. His activities include: 2005-10 concept and direction of the "independent companies" section of the Norddeutsche Tanztreffen - Tanzplan Bremen in whose context the festival Xtra Frei, continued 2011-12 with the ballet of the Hanover State Opera. 2009-11 the EU-project KoresponDance Europe, 2011-12 the European-West African training and production project HOME 52° 30' N 13° 23' E ELEV 37 m, 2014 the foundation of the festival AFRICTIONS - CAPTURED BY DANCE, organized with numerous partners in three cities nationwide, with over 100 artists_ from the African continent. Since 2015 collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences Bremen, founding member of the Tanzinitiative Bremen, since 2016 Bremen transnational project SEHNSUCHT EUROPA and currently the project THE CHOREONAUTS - artistic relations between Europe and Africa within the framework of the fund TURN. He is also active as a guest choreographer at home and abroad, as well as for opera productions at the Staatsoper Berlin, the Semperoper Dresden, the Opéra national du Rhin and the Salzburg Festival, among others.
Guido Markowitz
Guido Markowitz has been director of the Ballett Theater Pforzheim since 2015. Aesthetically, as an internationally experienced choreographer of ballet, musical and musical theater, the dancer, who was classically and contemporarily trained at the Iwanson International School of Dance in Munich, among others, and who enjoyed permanent engagements at the municipal stages of Münster and the Staatstheater Darmstadt, developed a clear line. Existential themes of time and art are staged on the basis of a contemporary understanding of dance in a variety of ways and with the inclusion of other arts.
In addition to full-length productions on, among others, artistic figures such as David Bowie and Gustav Klimt or multi-layered musical works such as Mozart's "Requiem", he has continuously and highly successfully developed full-length productions in venues initially remote from dance, including the Castle and Collegiate Church of St. Michael, the "Emma-Jäger-Bad" swimming pool or, together with Damian Gmür, the Pforzheim Jewelry Museum. Markowitz's works have been nominated several times for the German theater prize DER FAUST. Under his leadership, the Ballett Theater Pforzheim became a partner of TANZLAND, a member of the Dachverband Tanz and an international cooperation partner. In 2017, Guido Markowitz was elected to the board of Tanzszene Baden-Württemberg.
Juliane Raschel
Since 2019, Juliane Raschel has been the coordinator of Tanzplattform Rhein Main, a cooperation project between Künstlerhaus Mousonturm and Hessisches Staatsballett that is unique in Germany and promotes dance and its diverse actors in the Rhine-Main region and networks them both nationally and internationally. She trained in dance at the State Ballet School in Leipzig until 1997 and then studied history. During her history studies, she was a member of the Leipzig Dance Theater and was involved in networking the independent dance scene with each other and with institutional structures. Before moving to Frankfurt's Künstlerhaus Mousonturm as production manager and advisor to the artistic director, Juliane Raschel was a research assistant on the research project "Body Politics in the GDR - Dance Institutions between Elite Promotion, Popular Art and Mass Culture" at the Institute for Theater Studies at the University of Leipzig from 2012-2014.
"My work has been significantly shaped by the dual perspectives I have gained as a dancer and as an employee of various dance structures backstage. These have been particularly shaped over the last three years by my work in an inter-institutional initiative, between an international production house and a dance company based at two state theaters. I see it as a central task to bring together different resources and pools of experience across the various structures and scenes in order to advance dance at all levels and give it a voice in its many forms of articulation."