The ArtRose dance ensemble was founded in January 2011 through the initiative of Jenny Coogan, professor of contemporary dance at the Palucca University of Dance Dresden.

Under her guidance a group of 10 people aged (60+) from different professional backgrounds came together to experience a form of improvisational contemporary dance in both practice and in a collectively created and performed dance work.

The credo powering the ensemble is one that believes that everyone can source their own personal expression through dance. The parameters of our practice are therefore concerned with individual expressivity and collective consciousness that unfold in a poetic of everyday movement. Our creative processes combine a contemporary aproach of German Ausdruckstanz with strategies of the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic learning.

 

Our practice addresses the recognition, valuation snd acceptance of dance art performance practices with older non-professional dancers in Germany’s landscape. This conviction points towards a dismantling of existing presuppositions that concert dance be reserved solely for professionals. Our focus lies on the development and sustainability of a community in dance of collective authorship, distributed authority, and shared responsibility; one open for all.

Practice and performance are inseparable, i.e. what is experienced in the dance practice is reflected in the performances. In this sense, the dance pieces do not develop from a predetermined dramaturgy, but are born collectively out of the ensemble’s creative process evolving through improvisational tasks that offer the dancers visual, poetic and kineasthetic cues for sourcing their own movement.

To date the ensemble has developed and performed seven dance pieces.

 

The dramaturgical structure of the dances offer the performers a temporal and spatial orientation plan, or ‚score‘. Therefore each performance is full of unexpected movement sequences and moments of unplanned communication. All dances celebrate the vitality, creativity and life experience of the performers.

The group is open to all who want to engage with such artistic and social processes.  Through collaboration in both practice and performance with musicians, theater designers and young dance pedagogues a lively, cross-generational, interdisciplinary exchange accompanies our work.