Reinhild hoffmann biography

Reinhild Hoffmann moved to southern Germany as a child and studied ballet at a school in Karlsruhe.
General Information ; Last name:Hoffmann ; First name:Reinhild ; Birthdate:01/11/1943 ; Nationality:Poland ; Professions:Director, Choregrapher.
Reinhild Hoffmann is a German choreographer and dancer who is an important innovator in Tanztheater, along with Pina Bausch and Susanne Linke.

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Reinhild Hoffmann

German choreographer and dancer (born 1943)

Reinhild Hoffmann (born 1 November 1943 in Sorau) is a German choreographer and dancer who is an important innovator in Tanztheater, along with Pina Bausch and Susanne Linke.^[1]

Early years

Reinhild Hoffmann moved to southern Germany as a child and studied ballet at a school in Karlsruhe. From 1965 to 1970, she studied contemporary dance at the Folkwang School in Essen with Susanne Linke and Pina Bausch and graduated with a degree in dance education. Hoffmann, Linke, and Bausch are often credited as the three chief founders of the contemporary hybrid form known as Tanztheater in Germany (where it originated) and dance theater in English-speaking countries.^[2] Hoffmann demonstrates a concern for the female perspective in her work, and she has revived from Expressionist dance the use of masks, an appreciation for the solo, and an emphasis on expressive abstraction in movement.^[3]

After leaving the Folkwang School, Hoffmann worked as a dancer for both Kurt Jooss and Johann K

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Reinhild Hoffmann’s Callas © Mezzo

The idea of Tanztheater (dance theatre) came out of Germany in the 1920s. It started as ‘expressionist dance’ and was reborn in the 1980s in the work of German choreographers such as Pina Bausch and Reinhild Hoffmann. The influences of Bertold Brecht and Max Reinhardt are acknowledged as is the cultural melting pot of the Weimar Republic.

In 1983, Reinhild Hoffman created the ballet Callas, using dramatic arias sung by Maria Callas as her musical base. In 2017, she was invited to recreate the work with the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève in Switzerland. The original work for 18 dancers was enlarged to encompass 22 dancers. At this point, 34 years after the work’s debut, she was faced with teaching the dancers a new dance vocabulary.

Reinhild Hoffmann © Chabrowski

To go back to the origins of the work, Hoffmann first sought to set Othmar Schoeck’s Penthesilea, but permission was denied. The same with a request to set Richard Strauss’ Elektra. Hoffmann gave up on the world of copyright characters with their guardian families and

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The performance in her “Solo with Sofa”, in a long evening dress, tied to a couch, made Reinhild Hoffmann one of the most important choreographers in German dance theatre in 1977.

Born in 1943, she began studying at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen in 1965. Kurt Jooss and Jean Cébron were among her teachers. In 1970 she danced in the ensemble of Johann Kresnik at the Theater Bremen. In 1974 she started as co-director of the Folkwang Tanzstudio, together with Susanne Linke to choreograph herself.

In 1977 she went to New York to study choreography, returning the following year to become director of the Bremer Tanztheater, at times together with Gerhard Bohner, to take over. She stayed in Bremen for eight years, choreographing on the side for her own company, with which she also went on tour.

Four times during the 1980s she was invited to the most important theatre festival in Germany, the Berlin Theatertreffen, and had thus achieved a quality in dance that until then only the famous Pina Bausch. For almost a decade she went to Bochum with her ensemble in 1986. She has b