Prof. Nik Haffner

Nik Haffner is dancer, choreographer and since 2012 the artistic director of HZT Berlin - Inter-University Centre for Dance. Many of his choreographic works were developed in collaboration with other artists, a.o. with Christina Ciupke, Mart Kangro and from 1999 until 2005 as member of the performance collective commerce. After studying dance Nik Haffner joined William Forsythe’s company in Frankfurt from 1994 until 2000 as a dancer. From 2000 on he has worked as a freelance dance-artist, making work for stage, film and exhibition. He has been guest-teaching at a.o. Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK), P.A.R.T.S. Brussels, Trinity Laban London and Ohio State University. Nik Haffner has been a member of the Tanzkongress Deutschland board, of the jury for the German Dance Award and the spokesperson for the national dance education network AK/T Ausbildungskonferenz Tanz Deutschland.

Fields and interests of research

Since 2024, choreographer Christina Ciupke, with whom I have collaborated for many years, and I have engaged in research on archiving. A particular interest of us is to explore dance-artists’ studio practice as an knowledge-archive beyond objects. With an ongoing conversational practice and peer-interviews, this research reflects on experiences of how knowledge is generated, passed on and disseminated through immaterial dance-studio practice. Our core questions revolve around how practice-knowledge in dance can gain more awareness and visibility, and can be recognized as a complementary expansion of the knowledge collections in archives for dance and performing arts with their usual focus on objects, artefacts and documents. 

My initial curiosity and interest in studying movement through animation-film-making has led to several collaborations on media-publications in dance focusing on movement as memory and movement-traces. From there an ongoing interest has been in researching and developing co-authored works with artists from other disciplines such as architecture, sculpture, acoustic and visual media-art.

Selected artistic projects

• William Forsythe, Nik Haffner, Volker Kuchelmeister, Yvonne Mohr, Astrid Sommer, Christian Ziegler: Improvisation Technologies, media publication (1999, 2023), more informatio

• Christina Ciupke, Nik Haffner, Mart Kangro: new work, choreographic work (2015), more informatio

• July Weber with Nik Haffner, Hermann Heisig, Peter Pleyer, Meg Stuart, Claudia Tomasi: FORMEN FORMEN (2015), more informatio

• Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion, with Nik Haffner: Seven Duets, online score as part of the web-publication series motionbank (2013), more information

• Christina Ciupke, Nik Haffner, Mart Kangro: wait and see, choreographic work (2012), more informatio

• Christina Ciupke, Nik Haffner: kannst du mich umdrehen, choreographic work (2011), more informatio

• Nik Haffner, Bernd Lintermann, Thomas McManus: TimeLapses, choreographic motion-capture-research (2000 - 2003), more informatio

• Jarosław Kapuściński and Nik Haffner: Yours, media-performance for midi-piano and projected body (2000), more informatio