Dancing Dreams (ATOM Study Guide)

Kontakthof is a modern dance performance about feelings. Bearing the unmistakable signature of Pina Bausch, the piece deals with forms of human contact, encounters between the sexes, and the search for love and tenderness with all the attendant anxieties, yearnings and doubts. As a performance piece, it always poses a big challenge.

In 2008, forty teenagers between fourteen and eighteen years of age spent every Saturday learning how to perform Kontakthof. Drawn from over eleven schools in Wuppertal, the students rehearsed under the direction of Bausch-trained dancers Josephine Ann Endicott and Bénédicte Billiet and under the intense supervision of Pina Bausch herself. Their journey from rehearsal room to the theatre stage was both physically and emotionally challenging.

Dancing Dreams documents the rehearsal process. We watch the teenagers making their first clumsy attempts to transform the subjects of the dance performance into motion and choreography and to develop their own individual ways of using their bodies to express themselves. They soon find themselves part of a creative process, which leads to greater personal awareness. By opening night, the teenagers have become less shy, more self-confident, independent individuals.