Students at the HZT Berlin

A strong network for a future profession

Some students in the two master’s study courses – Choreography and Solo/Dance/Authorship – are very experienced artists. Many of them use the time while studying to gain their master’s to learn how to better identify and articulate what lies at the core of their artistic work and to further develop their own artistic praxis. In the bachelor’s study course – Dance, Context, Choreography – the students try out things for the first time in their own projects, as dancers or choreographers, or in new fields to be discovered. As the HZT understands dance, choreography and performance as collaborative praxes, groups from the different study courses often come together. Examples of such collaborations are the Mineralwasser (mineral water) collective or the Suddenly collective. Besides this, there are many project-related teams among our graduates working together who remain internationally networked.
 

Transcultural choreographic practices

In the past years, several HZT students have artistically explored topics and dances from different, sometimes own cultural origins. When translating these into the here and now, they experiment with alienation, transference, and linkage to contemporary forms of dance, different perspectives and understandings, as well as to digital media. As such, in her final exam project “Masterpiece” in the MA course in Solo/Dance/Authorship, Luisa Fernanda Alfonso examined the excessively performative nature of character dances and the Mexican Mariachi, which are distinguished by hyper-dramatics, hyper-virtuosity and hyper-sexuality. In collaboration with the composer Peter Rubel, and surrounded by an ensemble of different loudspeakers, Luisa Fernanda Alfonso dealt with the poetry of assembly and disassembly, of repetition and transformation right up to the interruption and abandonment of dances and songs that attempt to exist in harmony and in dissonance.

Grants while studying

Thanks to additional grant money, Hannah Schillinger, a student in the MA in Choreography, developed her project “runners” in cooperation with the foundation “Stiftung Reinbeckhallen” in a rehearsal phase over several weeks. She had applied for the grants as part of the preparations for her master’s project. This enabled Hannah Schillinger to put together a large team, in which she worked with lighting designer Vito Walter, guitarist Alex Zampini and costume designer Louis Schmitt as well as eight dancers, among them several HZT BA and MA students. For her final exam project in the 60-meter-long Rheinbeckhallen, Hannah Schillinger placed dancers and the audience into the slowly descending darkness as a jointly and mutually moving group. With a focus on energetic sovereignty, “runners” explored how energy levels and structures can be actively, and at the same time regeneratively, modulated and formed.

First professional experience in Berlin’s dance and performance scene

The BA Student emeka ene is among the HZT students who already networked during his studies with the Berlin dance scene, thus preparing his transition into his later professional field. emeka ene is in the final year of the Dance, Context, Choreography bachelor programme and, among other things, was a performer in “Dawn: A Musical on Reproduction” by HZT graduate Sheena McGrandles, and in the Drone-Doom-Metal art performance “DOOM” by Layton Lachman & Samuel Hertz. In 2021, emeka ene worked with the HZT graduate Lee Méir for “safe&sound”, an ensemble piece which, as the journalist Frank Weigand wrote, “in which one recognises the flat hierarchies that led to its emergence – and at the same time a masterfully built space of possibilities in which a group can come into existence without dissolving individualities in the process.”