Date:
Open Sharing, Friday 21.3.2025 from 6 pm
DOCK 11, Saal 4
Kastanienallee 79
10435 Berlin
Free admission, no registration required
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Anarchiving Exiled Practice/Dance as an Art of Survival
Claudia Kappenberg (UK) & Thomas Kampe (UK), with James Batchelor ( AUS/Berlin) & Aurelia Heintze (D)
Basement Dances is a collaborative research project by Dr. Claudia Kappenberg & Dr. Thomas Kampe. It documents and archives traces of the creative practice of the Jewish choreographer Hilde Holger (Vienna 1905 - London 2001).
Kappenberg and Kampe, together with dancer/scholars James Batchelor & Aurelia Heintze, have spent a week at DOCK 11 experimenting with various techniques and, with Open Sharing, are offering the opportunity to approach the choreographic work of Hilde Holger. Holger (née Sofer) was a prominent Jewish dancer, teacher and member of the Bodenwieser Tanzgruppe before the Second World War. After the Anschluss in 1938, she worked illegally and left Austria in 1939 thanks to a visa for India. After ten years in Bombay, she settled in London in 1948, where she taught in her basement studio in Camden until her death in 2001. Basement Dances is based on video footage from the 1990s and memories of her students, including Kappenberg and Kampe, who worked with Holger for over a decade. Dance was vital to Holger, enabling artistic expression, resilience, and an inclusive pedagogy that rebelled against all forms of discrimination and is relevant again today. Basement Dances explores the de-archiving of diasporic experiences of modern dance.
More:
ckappenberg.info/basement-dances
thomaskampe.wordpress.com/recent-projects-2
Supported by Bath Spa University and the University of Brighton.
With the kind support of DOCK 11 / DOCKdigital