After engagements at the Texas Ballet Theater and the ballet of the Hannover State Opera, Michael Foster’s repertoire includes many leading roles in ballets by Jörg Mannes (including ‘Madame Bovary’, ‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘Ein Stück Zeit’) as well as works choreographed by Ben Stevenson, Mauro Bigonzetti (‘La Piaf’) and Hans van Manen (‘Five Tangos’). Having trained at the Tulsa School of Ballet, the Tulsa Ballet Center for Dance Education and Houston Ballet II under Claudio Muños, the American dancer has also been active as a choreographer. For ‘New Steps’, the evening for young choreographers at Hannover State Opera ballet company, he contributed the pas de deux ‘Engel’ in 2010, ‘This May Be Our Last Time …’ in 2011 and ‘Storm Birth’ in 2012. He then moved to join Martin Schläpfer’s Ballett am Rhein company at the beginning of the 2013/14 season, where he was able to supplement his repertoire with works choreographed by Martin Schläpfer, Nils Christe, Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins and Marco Goecke, and many others. He made his debut as a choreographer with the Ballett am Rhein in 2016 with ‘Rapture’ as part of the choreography platform “Young Moves”. This was followed by ‘East Coasting’ (2017) and ‘Opus 29’ (2019). In the summer of 2021, he completed his Master’s degree in Dance Pedadogy specialising in professional training in classical ballet at the Palucca University of Dance, Dresden and at the start of the 2021/22 season he assumed the leadership of the Ballett am Rhein’s newly created dance education programme ‘Tanz mit!’ He was most recently seen on stage here as the Fire Captain in Andrey Kaydanovskiy’s ‘Die kahle Sängerin’, as the Grandfather in Demis Volpi’s ‘The Nutcracker’ and the Office Worker in ‘Geschlossene Spiele’. He also worked on ‘The Nutcracker’ as a choreographer.

https://www.operamrhein.de/en/people/michael-foster/

https://www.theater-duisburg.de/jung/tanz-mit/

Reading tips and other food for thought:

Constructivism Learning Theory & Philosophy Of Education: https://www.simplypsychology.org/constructivism.html

Photo by Sigrid Reinichs

Jo Parkes is a dance artist, facilitator and educator (D/UK). For over two decades, she has worked internationally with co-creative, participatory dance and creates installations, encounters, performances and videos. She is the founder and artistic director of Mobile Dance e.V. Mobile Dance offers art projects at the intersection of artistic and socio-political concerns. Mobile Dance has created projects in which hundreds of artists in Germany and the UK have been employed in participatory dance.

In 1995, Jo received a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue her Master's degree in Choreography at the University of California (UCLA). She earned a degree (First Class) in English Literature and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. In 2019, she won the Honorary Award in the German Dance Prize. Her most recent work, The Walking Projekt, received the IKARUS prize (DE) in 2021. From 2019 - 2021, Jo was on the board of Aktion Tanz: Dance in Education and Society the membership body for community and participatory dance in Germany, where she is now associated artist.  From 2020 - 2022, she was visiting professor at Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) in Berlin (UdK/Ernst Busch). In September 2022, Jo began as Course Leader for the new MA Dance: Participation, Communities, Activism at London Contemporary Dance School, which she co-wrote with the team at LCDS and which begins in September 2023.

Jo understands artistic co-creative processes with communities as research into how we live together: a laboratory in which diverse groups of people can investigate issues relevant to them. She is passionate about the potential of collective dance-making to help us imagine alternative ways of being together and creating opportunities for dance artists to expand and challenge their practice in exchange with communities.

www.joparkes.com

www.mobile-dance.com

https://theplace.org.uk/lcds-courses/madancepca

Reading tips from Jo: 

François Matarasso

https://arestlessart.com/home-2/francois-matarasso/

https://www.transcript-verlag.de/author/matarasso-francois-320022310/

Prhoto by Eva Raduenzel- Kitamura

Ingo Diehl is head of the Master for Contemporary Dance Education (MA CoDE), Vice President of the University for Music and Performing Arts in Frankfurt (HfMDK) and President of the Hessian Theatre Academy.

He studied dance in Hanover and New York, dance education in Cologne and worked as a dancer, choreographer and rehearsal director.

From 2005 - 2011 Ingo Diehl was responsible for the issues and the overall conception of the educational programme of Tanzplan Deutschland, an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. There he developed the 1st Biennale Tanzausbildung/Tanzplan Deutschland and led the research project Tanztechniken 2010/Tanzplan Deutschland.

In 2011 he founded together with Madeline Ritter the non-profit entrepreneurial company DIEHL+RITTER and developed the Tanzfonds also a project of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, addressing cultural heritage and - cultural education. In 2019, he curated the international student campus for the festival of the Akademie der Künste Berlin under the title "What the Body Remembers".

He is a founding member of the Bundesverband Tanz in Schulen (Federal Association of Dance in Schools), initiator of the Ausbildungskonferenz Tanz (Dance Education Conference), expert for accreditations of study programs and collaborating partner of the Motion Bank Project. His activities on the boards of trustees of the Tanztreffen der Jugend and Take Off Junger Tanz at the Tanzhaus NRW, as well as his advisory work for the German Dance Congress - serves to place a vivid exchange around dance education.

Photo@ Rebecca Hahn