Helge Letonja

Helge Letonia was born in Leoben, Austria and studied classical dance in Graz and Amsterdam, as well as modern dance under Alvin Ailey and Erick Hawkins in New York. Engagements lead him among others to the Ballet of the Oper Graz, Jan Fabre, Montréal Danse and to the dance theatre in Bremen under Susanne Linke. There, in 1995 he started to create his own pieces. 1996 he founded steptext dance project, which he established as a production house and center for contemporary dance art in 2003 in the Schwankhalle (which he co-conceptualized). He is the Director and Artistic Director there to this day.

In addition to his 50 dance creations, which are often realized in interdisciplinary and transcultural collaboration and presented worldwide, he choreographs for opera productions, including those of the Salzburg Festival, the Zurich Opera House, the Berlin State Opera, New National Opera Tokyo and Semperoper Dresden. Due to his impressively sensual aesthetic, Helge Letonja creates lively friction surfaces and interesting reflections of social conditions and processes.

In his recent work for the dance company Of Curious Nature, which he leads as artistic director since 2019, he focusses on somatic movement research, expanding his ensemble's artistic expressions to portray the complexity of the contemporary human. His repertoire ranges from dynamic, powerful ensemble pieces to subtle detailed imagery. His works are a wide range of visual associations in organic stage landscapes to choreographies entirely dedicated to the dialogue between dance and music.

In addition, Helge Letonja is an advocate for the interests of dance, both in his chosen home Bremen and nationwide, as a board member of the Dachverband Tanz (umbrella organization for dance) and is committed to strengthening and communicating the art of dance in a wide range of collaborations. In this way, he opens up dance as a mediator of cultural diversity, social participation, interdisciplinary arts and research.

Quotation: „With every piece, I search for an individual dance language, for a motive in the stream of questions of our society…”