Catherine Launay is a French culture manager for theatre, dance, and sound art based in Berlin. Her field of expertise is the coordination and dissemination of interdisciplinary and experimental projects, especially between Germany and France. She manages artists who cross boundaries and experiment with new forms, especially through collaborations and interactions with the audience. Catherine Launay has worked with theatre groups, such as Les Patries imaginaires and Les ombres portées, as well as with the choreographer Mathilde Monfreux or the electroacoustic music duo Kristoff K. Roll. Currently she manages the travelling theatre Ton und Kirschen and the Berlin-based Scottish choreographer Colette Sadler. Catherine Launay works for the Performing Arts Programm Berlin at the Central Point of Contact & Touring Office since 2022.

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The performance art collective CocoonDance was founded by the choreographer Rafaële Giovanola in 2000. Since then, they have been producing at the independent Theater im Ballsaal in Bonn, Germany. An important foothold of the company is in the Théâtre du Crochetan in Monthey, Switzerland.

Through research with various movement experts and non-academically trained bodies outside the theatre, the company explores techniques often alien to dance, leading the group to a greater understanding of the body and movement, to the creation of new bodies, imaginative creatures with their movement vocabulary. With its glossary work, the company is developing a tool that has already been crucial for pieces such as Momentum, Vis Motrix, Hybridity, Standard, or Runthrough.

CocoonDance has produced around fifty full-length productions that have toured on five continents. They won numerous awards and were invited to showcase festivals, such as Tanzplattform Deutschland, in 2018 and 2020, as well as STEPS Switzerland, ANTIGEL in Geneva, CODA Festival in Oslo, MILANoLTRE, and more.

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Located at the intersection of meaning between movement, text, objects, and image, Colette Sadler approaches choreography as Gesamtkunstwerk. Her focus on creating new images of the dancing body in interdisciplinary performance aims to describe bodies and their identities in states of transformation; states where the body’s potential for fiction and hybridity creates passages between real and virtual realms. Her work has been shown in many international dance and visual art contexts, including Tanz im August Berlin, Kaaitheater Brussels, Théâtre de Liège, Tokyo Festival, South Bank Centre London, Les Lattitudes Contemporaines France, Nordic house Reykyavik and OGR Turin Italy. 

Colette Sadler’s current touring works include Oracle Leaves - Portraits of Daphne (2022), ARK 1 (2021), and Learning from the Future (2017). Learning from the Future was part of the British Council Showcase in 2019 and Laureate winner PODIUM in 2021. ARK 1 was developed into an exhibition within the context of Goethe*Morph Iceland in 2022.

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Founded by choreographer & dancer Renate Graziadei and choreographer & dramaturge Arthur Stäldi in Hamburg in 1994, laborgras has been based in Berlin since 2000. It has established itself as an internationally renowned artist collective. laborgras experiments with dance as a form of expression, exploring its conditions and expanding it further. They collaborate with a wide range of artists and connect with different artistic disciplines. Continuous exchange and new encounters are part of their fixed concept. In March 2015, laborgras received the Berlin Art Award in the performing arts category, and in September 2015, Renate Graziadei was nominated for the German Theater Award DER FAUST for her dance performance in the production Transition.

From 2023 to 2025 laborgras will unfold a guest performance cooperation with the TauberPhilharmonie in Weikersheim, Germany, for the performances DAS FEST, Movement Episodes and Habitat.

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Of Curious Nature is a contemporary dance company made up of artists from all over the world and the centrepiece of the dance development project TanzRAUM Nord. They are based in Northwest Germany.

Their diversity of backgrounds and experiences adds to a rich and unique artistic identity entirely dedicated to contemporary dance. The movement language is intense, approachable, emotional, and inspired by the impulses of the world's current environment. The wide-ranging audience is drawn into a varied and surprising dance experiences, created by artistic director Helge Letonja and international guest choreographers.
Helge Letonja, choreographer, and artistic director of steptext dance project and the dance company Of Curious Nature, has created more than 50 dance works presented worldwide, often realized in interdisciplinary and transcultural collaborations. He is a tireless advocate for the interests of dance, both in his adopted home of Bremen and nationwide, as a board member of the German Dance Association and is committed to strengthening and communicating the dance in a wide range of collaborations.

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Repetition, pedestrian elements, gestures, stillness and movement, order and chaos are at the core of Milla Koistinen´s work – shifting from real to imagined space, from recognizable and every day to the strange and poetic. Bringing together non-professionals of different ages and backgrounds with professional performers is influential to her choreographic process. Besides stage presence, shifting from seemingly natural to the abstract is essential to her work. Where she creates different experiences and spaces, which allow the audience to engage in various ways.

In Milla Koistinen’s latest creations, One Next To Me, Breathe, and Magenta Haze, she explores the relationship between individual and crowd. All three works invite the spectator to observe a choreography of subtle tipping points between distance and closeness, togetherness and estrangement, fragility and strength.

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projekt-il was founded by the actors and directors Alexander Steindorf and Bianca Künzel in 2013. projekt-il pursues the goal of combining visual and performing skills within theatre projects. They develop them beyond the claim of a self-reflecting and reproducing perception in every day and socially relevant concepts. projekt-il has realised productions for the FFT Düsseldorf, the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, the Nationaltheater Weimar, and the asphalt Summer Festival of the Arts.

Currently, projekt-il is concentrating on the evolvement of the project at the table, in which artists from all over the world trace the family table as a central place of negotiation, and as the smallest social cell. Live at the table, as a video installation and in the virtual living room, artists from various disciplines perform their family table: They trace breaking points, secret codes, and open flanks of family negotiation in different social contexts and across national borders.

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SHIBUI Kollektiv was founded by the Japanese-born choreographer Emi Miyoshi in 2013 and produces at the intersection of dance and installation. SHIBUI is a Japanese word that refers to the aesthetics of simple, humble, and rare beauty - a beauty that can also offend and leave a bitter aftertaste. SHIBUI is directed against short-lived trends or generally accepted ideas. Most recently, Emi Miyoshi dealt with the feeling of loneliness and interconnectedness in various ways. SKIN literally gets under the skin and confronts the feeling of social and emotional alienation. The new production, RESTEP, is an intensive exploration of folk dances and the transfer of their multifaceted characteristics into a modern and intercultural form.  Since the 2022/23 season, Miyoshi has been supported by the residency network Réseau Grand LUXE and Theater Freiburg, an exchange platform for young, emerging choreographers and their innovative projects.

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Unusual Symptoms have been company-in-residence at Theater Bremen since 2012. Founded by the French-Algerian choreographer Samir Akika, the company and dance division of Theater Bremen have been co-directed by Alexandra Morales and Gregor Runge since 2018. International co-productions, collaborations with changing guest choreographers and works in interdisciplinary constellations characterize their new orientation, with which they have repositioned Theater Bremen's dance department at the interface between municipal theatre and independent scene.

Unusual Symptoms have worked with internationally renowned choreographers such as Claire Croizé, Faye Driscoll, Máté Mészáros, Núria Guiu Sagarra, and Adrienn Hód, alongside house choreographer Samir Akika. Furthermore, they have developed projects with young performers, created exchange formats and festivals. Unusual Symptoms and Theater Bremen were invited to Tanzplattform Deutschland with two productions in 2020.

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