The piece is part of the longer-term development being pursued by Mandafounis as Artistic Director of the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company. The ensemble works on the basis of his methodology, which enables the dancers to create a new choreography live on stage from their bodies, movements and actions, in every performance and new moment on stage.

In addition to this focus on improvisation, Mandafounis repeatedly undertakes unusual experiments in his productions: be it that he combines improvised dance with narrative dramaturgies, or focuses on collaboration with dance students, or allows the audience to get very close to the ensemble in a changing performance with different stations. "Here Is There" will also be part of this exploration of the boundaries of what a dance evening can be.

The new piece "Here is There" by Ioannis Mandafounis celebrate its world premiere on 04.06.2025 in Frankfurt at Bockenheimer Depot.

Ioannis

Choreography

Dancers of the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company

Dance

Here is There

Schauspiel Frankfurt

Human encounters are always unpredictable. You eye one another, rush ahead, wait, circle each other, stumble, suddenly stop, start again - and maybe realize, ah, yes, we can understand each other.

The scenes in "À la carte" use different props, sound effects, music and lighting to allow for a variety of dance styles, atmospheres and topics. The starting point is always the encounter between the ensemble and the audience, just as if they were cooking a colorful menu together. The framework for this is Ioannis Mandafounis' dance methodology, which makes it possible to create a choreography live on stage. Almost nothing that the dancers do in this production is predetermined. All movements arise from the meeting of the different bodies.

"À la carte" was the first production by the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company under the artistic direction of Ioannis Mandafounis. With this work, the ensemble presents its dance practice, which is based as much on the exchange between the individual artists as it is on communication with the audience.

Pauline

Choreographic assistance

Manon

Musical direction

Anna

Philipp

Dramaturgy

Stage and Lighting

Thomas

Costumes

Emanuele

Live Electronic Music

À la carte

Concertgebouw Brugge

Hellerau - European Centre for the Arts

Light. Something appears: an image, a formation, movement, development, transformation. Dark. And light. Something new: it is massive, it turns, it vibrates, it encompasses everything. Dark. And light. Surprise. And dark. And light. And dark.

"Join" makes a simple and yet difficult attempt: How can dancers come together at completely different points in their personal and professional trajectory? How can an ensemble of professionals working at the highest level dance together with a group of students? How do people come together in their diversity? What connections are possible beyond a standardising and unifying norm? "Join" takes a step in this direction for dance. Students from the city where the performance takes place dance together with the ensemble of the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company. The dramaturgy of the evening is determined by instant blackouts, which lend the scenes a sense of immediacy and constantly challenge the audience's perception.

The world premiere of "Join" is funded by the "Fonds Zero" programme of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. This is intended to support cultural institutions in trying out climate-friendly forms of production and new aesthetics with the lowest possible climate impact. The CO2-emissions were recorded during the process. Any emerging potential for cutting emissions was intended to make our working methods more sustainable in the future.

„Join“ unternimmt einen einfachen und doch schwierigen Versuch: Wie können Tänzer*innen an völlig unterschiedlichen Punkten ihrer Entwicklung zusammenkommen?

Dance students from the respective city

Music

Smaralia

Rehearsal manager

Join

De Singel International Arts Centre

A celebration of the small but mighty, transforming everyday life movements into dance, Pizzicato invites kids to join in the treasure hunt, open the junk drawers, and discover new sounds and movements. Listening to the music not only with their ear, watching the dance not only with their eyes, but with their whole body. We tell the story of a tiny little world of secret places and magical objects that have the power to transform reality. Every movement can become a choreographic event, suddenly becoming a dance.

Viola and bow usually go hand in hand, but "Pizzicato" shows off another side of the instrument. Performed entirely in pizzicato, it highlights the virtuosity and expressiveness of plucking and reveals the dancing rhythms hidden in everyday objects. A performance of embodied sound, opening a subtle and organic dialogue between music and dance for the little ones.

NINA VALLON is a Swiss-Brazilian choreographer and dancer. She pursues an interdisciplinary approach to choreography and performance. She danced for The Forsythe Company and shaped the independent contemporary dance and performance scene in Frankfurt by founding ID_Frankfurt, the Rough Cuts Festival and the Z-Zentrum. She is currently collaborating with American violist Julie Michael on various projects and searching for new ways to combine music and dance.

Nina

Julie

Viola

Marta

Stage

Pizzicato

Bockenheimer Depot

As much as Ioannis Mandafounis is influenced by the innovations that were made in dance improvisation in the second half of the 20th century, his artistic journey is also that of a ballet dancer. To pay tribute to this double heritage he creates a new piece for a small cast that contrasts classical dance technique with the development of improvisational dance and his own method of live-choreography. Two dancers from the ensemble will encounter Jón Vallejo from the Semperoper Dresden. This is a deep dive both into dance history and into the biography of a dancer. The passion, the grit, the endurance, glamour, doubts, triumphs and injuries – it’s all fiction and it’s all true.

Jón

Eins vor, zwei zurück

Rosalind Crisp's artistic passion is in using compositional tools to ‘forget’ movements and reveal instead how they can be forever reforming themselves when freed from set patterns and meanings. Her practice works with the constant changingness that relates to the reality of our material bodies - and that reflects, more and more starkly, the world that we are ‘undoing’. Her compositional tools invite dancers to absorb, recreate and transmit this continual changingness. She will engage the dancers of DFDC not with the psychology of what they experience, but with the corporeality of it.

As one principle to enable that vulnerability the dancers will inhabit the transitions where something is not yet one thing nor another, while drawing the audience's attention to how movement is forming, rather than to the moves thereby produced.In this practice rupture is as valid and important as flow. The work is presented in a setting of proximity where the audience can move and shift their own bodies throughout the space. Pianist and composer Frédéric Blondy will improvise live, adding his similarly visceral treatment of the piano to the dance.

ROSALIND CRISP is a choreographer and dancer based in Orbost, Australia. In 1996 she established the Omeo Dance studio in Sydney as a place for her choreographic research. The studio became the home of the experimental dance scene in Sydney for ten years. In 2003 Crisp was invited by Carolyn Carlson to become the first Associate Artist of her ‘Atelier de Paris’. The Atelier managed and toured Rosalind’s company’s works throughout France and Europe (2004-2014), and facilitated her collaboration with French, European and Australian artists.

Rosalind has created over 25 major works, numerous events and performances, internationally toured her work to hundreds of festivals and is sought after for her dance methodology. Her extensive body of work critically questions dance through a rigorous practice of live composition, in all its certainty and doubt. She situates the dancer as an art maker. Her works emerge from sustained studio practice and long-term exchange with a multi-disciplinary team of colleagues. Rosalind Crisp is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and, in recognition of her influence on a generation of Australian dancers, an Honorary Fellow to the University of Melbourne-VCA. She received in 2025 the Creative Australia Award in the dance category.

Rosalind

Seen Unseen

Byways

Two travellers from outer space stop off on Earth with a mission: to find out what it means to be human. They have already gathered a few facts: for example, that there are things like time and money. They have learned how humans move from cartoons. But everything they do seems strange; the way they speak sounds a bit wrong and the way they dress is somehow funny. A few questions remain unanswered, and not just for the aliens.

"What's up, Earthling?" is a play for everyone aged 5 and older. It is a humorous, playful attempt to explore human habits, by the two choreographers and dancers Caroline Beach and Saida Makhmudzade.

CAROLINE BEACH is a choreographer, dancer and musician. She completed her master's degree in choreography at the Palucca University of Dance Dresden and her master's degree at the AdBK Nuremberg. She has shown her work in a wide variety of venues: theatres, galleries, off-spaces and in the digital realm.

SAIDA MAKHMUDZADE is a dancer and choreographer. She creates playful, conceptual works rooted in somatic research. She uses humour as a stylistic device to create space for the subtle and delicate, but also to get to the bottom of serious questions.

Caroline

Saida

Choreography and Performance

Amelie

Josef

Stage and Costume

Kati

Prodcution Management

Was geht, Erdling?

Maybe you can’t and shouldn’t try to explain a choreographic work. When asked, “what is the work about?”, the accurate answer would be: “well, I have no idea, we have to wait and see”. The only thing pre-determined when it comes to choreography, the way Emanuel Gat sees and practices it, is the HOW. The WHAT, the WHY, the WHEREOF, are all elements which emerge from the thing as it is happening.

Asking what a choreographic work is about, is like asking what the score is before a football match has even begun. And yet inviting to such a live experience should contain that which has actually already been decided on.

Emanuel Gat’s work with the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company will engage with two of the Lieder from Gustav Mahler’s song cycle “Das Lied von der Erde”. Two parts, with “Der Einsame im Herbst” and the last Lied of the cycle, “Der Abschied”, frame a third central part that is without music. Completely different every time it is being performed, the work follows principles in which the choreographic future cannot be designed, but has to be discovered by the dancers each time they engage with the work. Welcome, enjoy the experience!

EMANUEL GAT was born in Israel in 1969 and started working as an independent choreographer in 1994. Over the following ten years, through numerous projects, collaborations and creation processes, Gat developed a unique and personal approach to choreography and dance making, setting the foundations for his artistic vision and laying the groundwork for his future body of work. He founded his company, Emanuel Gat Dance, in Tel Aviv in 2004, and later chose to settle in France. The company has gained international recognition for its unique voice and has toured regularly to the four corners of the world, to great critical acclaim.

For the past 25 years Gat’s work has been presented in most of the leading dance venues and festivals all around the world, danced by a strong and diverse group of long-term collaborators. Parallel to his choreographic work, Gat designs the lighting to all of his works, making it an integral component of his creative process. During his entire career, Gat has developed a rich methodological set of tools and an original pedagogical approach to dance making. He is regularly invited to teach and collaborate with the world's leading dance schools and institutions, as well as offering regular opportunities for young dancers and makers to immerse themselves in his practice, through internships, workshops and master classes.

"Der Abschied" is a new piece by the Israeli choreographer Emanuel Gat and celebrates its world premiere on 23 October 2025 at the Bockenheimer Depot in Frankfurt.

Schedule

Abschied

Abschied

Byways

Eins vor, zwei zurück

Seen Unseen

Join

Join

Byways

Eins vor, zwei zurück

Seen Unseen

Was geht, Erdling?

Was geht, Erdling?

Pizzicato

Pizzicato

À la carte

À la carte

Here is There

Here is There

Here is There

Here is There