Symposium Choreographic Legacies: Sustaining and Reviving Dance Repertoire

How can one breathe new life into existing dance pieces again and again, so that new and older audiences can (re)experience them? Dance is typically an art form that comes to life at the moment of performance, while it afterwards only remains through traces in the bodies of the dancers and the memories of spectators. Truly reviving a dance work requires a sustained and sometimes innovative repertoire practice, in which the work is passed on to a new group of dancers or receives a revitalizing reinterpretation.

Transmitting or reimagining dance repertoires, however, are complex processes because they require profound investments in terms of the documentation of the choreography and creation processes, the physical transfer of the work between dancers, and communication towards the audience. When the choreographer of the work is still alive, they can manage these processes themselves. But what happens when the original creators are no longer there, or when dance companies are disbanded - does this equally mean that the work ceases to exist? Moreover, when new generations of choreographers want to engage with the work of their predecessors, what challenges do they experience?

We will address these and other questions together with an impressive range of inspiring colleagues from the Flemish and international dance sector during the symposium Choreographic Legacies: Sustaining and Reviving Dance Repertoire, a collaboration between STUK, OBV and the University of Antwerp.

Bios speakers

Jan Vandenhouwe

Jan Vandenhouwe is general Artistic Director at Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, starting from the 2019-2020 season. After studying Musicology in Leuven and Berlin, he worked as an opera and music critic for the Flemish newspaper De Standaard. From 2005 to 2008, he was dramaturg at the Opéra national de Paris, where he worked closely with artistic director Gerard Mortier while also being responsible for the program at L’Amphithéâtre Bastille. From 2009 to 2011, Vandenhouwe curated the concert program at the Concertgebouw Brugge. As a freelance (music) dramaturg, he worked in productions by the Teatro Real (Madrid), Ensemble InterContemporain and Klarafestival, among others. As a dramaturg, he collaborated intensively with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (Così fan tutte, Mitten wir im Leben sind/Bach6Cellosuiten, The six Brandenburg Concertos, among others), Alain Platel (C(H)OEURS, Nicht schlafen), Ivo van Hove (Macbeth, Brokeback Mountain, Salome, Boris Godunov, Don Giovanni) and Johan Simons (Fidelio, Boris Godunov, Das Rheingold, Alceste, Don Carlos). From 2015 to 2017, Jan Vandenhouwe was chief dramaturg for the Ruhrtriennale, under the artistic direction of Johan Simons.

Delphine Hesters

Delphine Hesters is coordinator of the dance heritage program at STUK, House for Dance, Image and Sound in Leuven. She also teaches qualitative research methodology at the University of Leuven. Previously, she worked as an independent consultant for institutions in art and art education and for policy makers (such as IETM, the Royal Academy of Antwerp, the Royal Conservatory Antwerp, oKo, Department CJM). From 2011 to 2019, Hesters worked at the Flemish Theatre Institute (VTi) and Flanders Arts Institute (Kunstenpunt) on research and development and as a policy expert, and served as the coordinator for the performing arts sector. She made the documentary podcast Generation XIII, following five students at the international dance school P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels through three years of training (2020-2023). As a sociologist, she did research on topics as the careers of contemporary dancers, gender and cultural diversity in the arts, and the precarious socio-economic position of the artist. She has a PhD in Sociology from KU Leuven and an MA in Cultural Management from the Antwerp Management School. During her doctoral research, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University with a Fulbright Scholarship.

Timmy De Laet

Timmy De Laet is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance Studies at the University of Antwerp and a Lecturer at the BA and MA Dance program of the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp (Belgium). He is the co-founder and coordinator of “CoDa | Cultures of Dance – Research Network for Dance Studies” (funded by the Research Foundation Flanders – FWO, grant ID: W000320N). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Theatre and Performance (together with Luk Van den Dries), and a member of the editorial boards of FORUM+ and Documenta. He has worked as a dramaturge with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui for the productions 3S (2020) and Vlaemsch (chez moi) (2022). His research interests include the reiterative nature of dance in relation to practice-oriented methodologies for the archivization, documentation, and historiography of dance. His writings on these topics have been published in various journals and anthologies. He has co-edited five collections of essays, including Choreographic (Re)Collections: Archiving Dance in Flanders (Documenta, with Annelies Van Assche), Language and Performance: Moving across Discourses and Practices in a Globalised World (EJTP, with Małgorzata Sugiera and Karel Vanhaesebrouck), and The Great European Stage Directors: Bausch, Castellucci, Fabre (Bloomsbury, with Luk Van den Dries).

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

In 1980, after studying dance at Mudra School in Brussels and Tisch School of the Arts in New York, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker created Asch, her first choreographic work. Two years later came the premiere of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. De Keersmaeker established the dance company Rosas in Brussels in 1983, while creating the work Rosas danst Rosas. Since these breakthrough pieces, her choreography has been grounded in a rigorous and prolific exploration of the relationship between dance and music. She has created with Rosas a wide-ranging body of work engaging the musical structures and scores of several periods, from early music to contemporary and popular idioms. Her choreographic practice also draws formal principles from geometry, numerical patterns, the natural world, and social structures to offer a unique perspective on the body’s articulation in space and time. In 1995, De Keersmaeker established the school P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels in association with De Munt/La Monnaie.

Robert Sturm

Robert Sturm studied Theater, Film and Television Studies, Philosophy, and International Politics in Cologne. From 1997 to 1999, he created his first own drama productions in Szolnok and Budapest. Since 1999, he has been the longtime artistic assistant and rehearsal director of Pina Bausch. In this role, he worked closely with her on the creation of her last ten world premieres as well as on the restaging of pieces from the company’s older repertoire. After Pina Bausch´s death, he and dancer Dominique Mercy became joint artistic directors of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch until 2013. Sturm also served as co-director of the anniversary season “Pina40”. Besides his work at the Tanztheater, he began staging several interdisciplinary projects in Wuppertal since 2015. The last one, Moby Dick (2021), was created in collaboration with Alexander Balanescu and Tony Cragg, and featured various longtime Tanztheater dancers (such as Ed Kortlandt, Jan Minarik, Jean Laurent Sasportes and Mark Sieczkarek). He has been Artistic Management Director of Tanztheater Wuppertal since 2019 and continues to work as a rehearsal director for several pieces by Pina Bausch.

Barbara Kaufmann

Barbara Kaufmann began her dance training at the Iwanson International School of Modern Dance in her hometown Munich in 1977 and subsequently travelled to Stockholm, Paris and New York to study dance. As a professional dancer, she performed with the Iwanson Dance Company as well as with Tanzprojekt München under the direction of Birgitta Trommler. When Susanne Linke invited her to join the Folkwang Dance Studio in 1984, Kaufmann came into contact with the choreographic style of Pina Bausch. After she danced in The Rite of Spring for the first time in 1985, she joined the ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in 1987, dancing in numerous repertoire pieces and new creations. From 2001 onwards, she began to assist Pina Bausch with rehearsals and was involved in restagings of repertoire pieces while also working on the company’s archives. In 2009, she took over as Rehearsal Director and assisted the guest choreographers Dimitris Papaioannou and Richard Siegal with their new creations. From 2010 to 2016, her work expanded to include collaborations with the Pina Bausch Foundation on documentation, video annotation, and oral history. Since 2017, she has been involved with the Pina Bausch Foundation to lead restagings of The Rite of Spring by the English National Ballet, the École des Sables, and the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, as well as a restaging of Iphigenia in Tauris by the Semperoper Ballet Dresden. In 2024, she restaged with the students of the English National Ballet School Pina Bausch’s early choreography The Tannhäuser Bacchanal, which she already restaged twice in 2004 and 2013.

Kaufmann has appeared in films of directors such as Amos Gitai, Pedro Almodovar and Wim Wenders.

Diane Madden

Diane Madden enjoys a multi-faceted relationship to dance from the perspectives of performer, teacher, tutor, director, creative assistant, mentor, and student. Since 1980, Madden has danced, directed, taught, studied and reconstructed Trisha Brown’s work. Having originated many roles in Brown’s work, she has received a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award (1989), two awards from the Princess Grace Foundation (1986 and 1994), and was honored along with the original cast of Brown’s Set and Reset collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg and Laurie Anderson by Movement Research, NYC (2012). Madden continues to serve the Trisha Brown Dance Company as Artistic Consultant. In 2019, she relocated to Brussels to assist Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and took a teaching, tutor, and mentor position at P.A.R.T.S. She continues to find her work supporting the P.A.R.T.S. students’ artistic development immensely fulfilling. Madden’s own performance work in solo and collaborative improvisational forms was greatly impacted by her work in the 1980s with the New York-based performance ensemble “Channel Z”, investigating the spontaneous, focused, and deeply physical movement states occurring in Contact Improvisation and developing its compositional potential addressing all aspects of theatre. In addition to “Channel Z”, Madden’s major influences have been Brown, Paxton, her study of Aikido with Fuminori Onuma, and the Fascia Therapy training she is currently undertaking with Anja Röttgerkamp.

Laura Arís Álvarez

Laura Arís Álvarez is a versatile artist known for her performing skills and internationally esteemed pedagogical work. She has a career that spans prestigious dance companies (Lanònima Imperial, Ultima Vez) and numerous independent artistic projects. She is a graduate of the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona, where she received the Extraordinary Student Award, and she was honored with the Lladró Award for outstanding dancer at the Festival de Valencia in 1997. She joined Ultima Vez in 1999 and performed in several acclaimed productions and dance films until 2008. Laura has assisted Wim Vandekeybus in various projects, including the re-staging of PUUR (2005) for the Royal Ballet of Sweden and Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, and served as choreographer's assistant and movement coach in collaborations with theatre director Ivo van Hove at the Dutch National Opera & Ballet, la Comédie-Française, and ITA (International Theatre Amsterdam). With over twenty years of teaching experience, Arís has passionately shared her expertise with students worldwide at institutions and festivals, such as Impulstanz Vienna, P.A.R.T.S., Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, La Faktoria Choreographic Center, and many others.

Koen Bollen

Koen Bollen studied Art History and Theater Studies at the universities of Brussels, Leiden and Antwerp. He became dramaturge at Junge Oper Stuttgart (2010-2014) and received the scholarship Akademie Musiktheater heute (2012-2014). Subsequently, he worked on, among others, the world creation Tonguecat at Bayerische Staatsoper, and with director Jorinde Keesmaat on Odysseus’ Women & Anaïs Nin (Louis Andriessen), and To be Sung (Pascal Dusapin) for the Centre of Contemporary Opera in New York. Since 2016 he is dramaturge at Opera Ballet Vlaanderen where he worked on the operas Pelléas et Mélisande (with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet), Rusalka (with Alan Lucien Øyen), Wim Henderickx’ The Convert (with Hans Op de Beeck), Ernani (with Barbora Horáková Joly); the dance productions Exhibition and Requiem by Cherkaoui, RASA by Daniel Proietto, A Bigger Thing by Lisi Estaras, Extant by Jermaine Spivey and Ombra by Alain Platel, as well as for different youth projects and small scale music theatre. Koen Bollen teaches at the Royal Conservatory in Antwerp, and at IOA in Ghent. He is co-editor and author of the book on the 50th history of Ballet Vlaanderen.

Olga de Soto

Olga de Soto is a Spanish choreographer, dance researcher, and visual artist based in Brussels. She began her choreographic work in 1992, exploring different formats in numerous pieces, some created in dialogue with works by contemporary music composers. Since the end of the 1990s, her work deals specifically with the role of memory in live art, questioning its value and lasting quality along two lines of research. The first centers on the study of physical memory through a pluralistic approach to dance and the body. The second explores works from the history of dance from the perspective of the perceptual memories of both spectators and dancers, focusing on voices traditionally marginalized within the artistic discourse. The resulting projects deal with documentation, testimony, archives, oral sources, narrative, and storytelling, while mixing the languages of choreography with those of documentary, performance, visual arts, and installation, thus playing with the porousness of those disciplines. Since the beginning of the 2000s, de Soto has been dedicated to creative projects intimately bound to long processes of research, founded on the essential work of documentation and according to atypical temporalities entirely detached from conventional production logics. Olga’s works have been presented in about twenty countries and she is regularly invited to teach at universities, speak at conferences, and lead workshops in Europe, South America, and the USA.

Zoë Demoustier

Zoë Demoustier is a performer and choreographer. She studied at the Mime School in Amsterdam and RITCS in Brussels. In her work, she connects contemporary dance with “Mime Corporel”. The body is always the starting point of her visual performances. Through movement, she makes connections with current topics and creates documentary choreographic work. She works in the studio and on stage with different bodies, generations and skills, looking for the authentic and unexpected. In 2022, she started a collaboration as a choreographer at Ultima Vez where she made the large stage production What Remains (2023), which was selected for the Belgian Theatre Festival. She created Choeur Battant/Beating Choir (2023) in collaboration with BRONKS (Brussels) and Le Carrousel (Quebec), the solo Unfolding an Archive (2021, in collaboration with STUK), What Was and What Now (201) and Nesting (2019, in collaboration with fABULEUS). In 2021, she was ambassador for the Day of Dance. Her aim is to use dance to appeal to a wide audience. Recently, Demoustier was awarded a two-year research grant from the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp (research group CORPoREAL). In this project, named “Wave”, she will explore how a new generation is engaging with the dance heritage from the 1980s and 1990s. Zoë is currently working on a new performance Hear the Silence (premiere October 2025), together with partners Ultima Vez, Montpellier Danse, South East Dance, Vlaams Cultuurhuis Brakke Grond, and KVS.

Àngels Margarit i Viñals

Àngels Margarit i Viñals has dedicated her career to dance, as a choreographer, dancer, pedagogue, and curator. She belongs to the first generation of contemporary dancers emerging in Barcelona in the early 1980s. After she started to work with the pioneer collective dance group Heura in 1979, she formed her own company Àngels Margarit / cia. MUDANCES in 1985, where she began to create her own projects spanning different fields and formats, including performances, site-specific pieces, video dance, installations, research in new media, as well as improvisations. Her shows have been co-produced by major festivals and international programs and over the years she has presented her work in more than 25 countries. As one of main figures of her generation in Catalan dance, Margarit has promoted numerous projects in the areas of dance creation, pedagogy, and dissemination. In the field of pedagogy, she has developed teaching programs for various institutions, such as the Dance Conservatory at the Institut del Teatre of Barcelona, next to regular courses, workshops, composition and repertoire classes in the international professional arena. In 2017, Margarit temporarily abandoned dance creation and pedagogy to manage the Mercat de les Flors – Dance House fulltime until February 2025. Throughout her trajectory, Margarit has received numerous national and international prizes as dancer, choreographer and curator, such as the Grand Prix at the Bagnolet Choreography Competition for Kolbebasar (France, 1988), the National Dance Award of Catalonia (1986,1991,1999), the City of Barcelona Performing Arts Award for Corol·la (1993). In 2010 she was granted the National Dance Award by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. In May 2022, she was recognized by the French Ministry of Culture with the insigne of “Chevalière des Arts et des Lettres”.

Lies Deschietere

Lies Deschietere studied architecture at Sint Lucas Ghent and worked for several years as an independent architect. Because of her great interest in the performing arts, she studied Cultural Studies at KU Leuven in parallel with her job, with internships at Braakland/ZheBilding (now Nieuwstedelijk) and Theater Antigone. After a passage at Cie Cecilia, NTGent and cc De Schakel, she started as a permanent programmer at Schouwburg Kortrijk. There she built a strong line-up with theater, dance, and all forms in between on the extensive program, both for the theatre and for the international performance festival NEXT. She established in-depth trajectories with artists while also looking for a profound connection with the audience, which for her is an important starting point for a cultural center. She developed a great love for dance with the aim of getting as many people as possible excited about dance, among others by giving numerous introductory talks to dance performances in different cultural centers. After an interlude as a freelancer for Theater Aan Zee and other cultural events or organizations, Lies started at CC De Schakel in Waregem, first as a programmer and now as director. There she uses her diverse experience to further develop CC De Schakel together with the team.

Griet Verstraelen

Griet Verstraelen trained dance at the Higher Institute for Dance (Lier) and at P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels). Afterwards, she studied Theatre Science at the University of Antwerp and Management in the performing arts in Brussels. She started her professional career at deSingel as production assistant and then went to work at STUK (Leuven), where she worked first as production manager and, from 2010 onwards, as a programmer of the seasonal programme, festivals and artist residencies. Within the programme, her focus was on movement in its most pure form in dialogue with themes such as togetherness, musicality and imagination. She created space for experiment and development for young dance artists on the one hand, but also for repertoire and established choreographers on the other hand. After she left STUK, Griet Verstraelen worked with Marc Vanrunxt and Salva Sanchis as business director and producer, and together they developed a new structure for the dance organization Kunst/Werk. From 2017 she worked closely with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at Rosas as responsible for distribution and international relations. In her final year at Rosas she was part of the management team. Since 2023, Griet Verstraelen has been Manager Ballet at Opera Ballet Vlaanderen where, under the direction of Artistic Director Jan Vandenhouwe, she is responsible for the operation of the ballet department.

Katleen Van Langendonck

Katleen Van Langendonck studied Germanic Philology and an additional year of philosophy in Leuven and Paris. She worked as a literary critic for the Belgian radio and the newspaper De Standaard in the 90s. She was assistant performing arts programming at deSingel international arts center in Antwerp from 1997 to 2002. From 2002 to 2007 she was a member of the academic staff at Antwerp University, where she lectured in dance history and dance analysis, did research on tactility in the performing arts, and coordinated the inter-university post-master in Theatre Studies. From 2007 until March 2020 Katleen Van Langendonck was responsible for the artistic programme of the Brussels performing arts center Kaaitheater. She initiated, amongst other projects, PERFORMATIK, the Brussels biennale for performing arts, a collaboration with other Brussels institutions from the visual as well as the performance arts field. At the moment she is coordinator performing arts and literature of the Europalia arts festival in Brussels, and she teaches and researches dance and performance art at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp. In 2023 she published the book The Art of Performance in Twenty-five Conversations (Track Report, Antwerp).

Madeline Ritter

Madeline Ritter is a qualified lawyer, arts programmer, and facilitator for change processes. From 1989 to 2004, she was the artistic director of tanz performance köln, an international production and festival platform for contemporary dance and new media. In 2004, she was called to the German Federal Cultural Foundation as a project director for her concept “Tanzplan Deutschland” – a partnership-based strategy that generated over 21 million euro for dance in Germany. Her non-profit organization Bureau Ritter received the Europa Nostra Award, the European Union’s most important cultural heritage prize, for “Tanzfonds Erbe”, a pioneering initiative to safeguard the intangible heritage of dance. Bureau Ritter also launched the “Dance On” initiative, which addresses age discrimination in the dance sector and in society. The federal funding programs TANZPAKT Stadt-Land-Bund and TANZPAKT Reconnect were designed to support structural investment in dance in Germany. Madeline Ritter serves as a member on various committees, among them the supervisory board of the international theatre Kampnagel and the advisory board of the Pina Bausch Foundation and the dance company Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods.