Handwork

The dancer/choreographer Isabelle Schad studied classical dance in Stuttgart and worked with numerous choreographers before starting to develop her own work in 1999. Her research focusses on the relationships between self, perception and experience, choreography and (re)presentation. She sees artistic practice as a place for learning processes, community and political participation. Her innovative projects are shown internationally in various contexts at festivals, museums and theatrical spaces. She teaches worldwide, is a Shiatsu, Reiki and Aikido practitioner and co-organiser of the workspace Tanzhalle Wiesenburg in Berlin. Schad received an honour for outstanding artistic developments in contemporary dance as part of the German Dance Award 2019. Her work Harvest (2021), a collaboration with Theater o.N. /Offensive Tanz für junges Publikum, was nominated for the Ikarus Prize 2022.

Josephine Findeisen, born in Dresden in 1990, studied dance, context and choreography at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz in Berlin. In her practice, she investigates socio-economic realities and researches the entanglements of class, gender and the body. Since 2016, she has produced various physical research projects on class issues, including A Work that doesn’t Work or We might as well be on Crystal, SCHWEIßARBEIT, Working Class Dance Group and AUTOSCOOTER. Josephine Findeisen organises the open meeting ‘Arbeiter:innentöchter Vereinigt Euch!’ at historical workplaces and monuments in Berlin.

Claudia Tomasi works as a freelance dancer and choreographer in Berlin & South Tyrol. She studied dance, context and choreography at the HZT Berlin. Since 2007 she has been working on her own pieces and in various collaborations as a choreographer, dancer and artistic assistant at the interface between contemporary dance, sound art and visual art.

Her current focus is on the exploration of traditions and rituals, inner/outer impulse work and working with amateurs, e.g. by returning her decades of experience as a stage artist to her home country. Through her intensive involvement with movement since her youth, at that time through yoga and with the subtle body, later with the Axis Syllabus, the Asian path arts on the one hand and craniosacral work and shamanism on the other, a further focus lies in the observation and promotion of process work of the human being as an artist beyond pure stage art.

Nora Mertes takes classical questions of sculpture and plastic art as her starting point to artistically investigate contemporary phenomena of body-space relationships. She is interested in the significance of movement and pictorial space in sculpture and everyday life – for example, she has been working on a ‘digital archive of manual knowledge’ with a video camera since 2022. She studied fine art, specialising in sculpture, at the Alanus Hochschule für Kunst und Gesellschaft in Alfter near Bonn, at Hiroshima City University and the Universität der Künste Berlin. She has shown her work in countless exhibitions in Germany and abroad and has been honoured with awards and grants. Since 2023, Mertes has been teaching and researching as Professor of Fine Arts (specialising in research) in the Interior Architecture degree programme, Department of Building and Design at Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences.