Moments. Gespräch mit Reinhild Hoffmann

In her earlier solo pieces, Reinhild Hoffman confronted concrete materials which at once limit and accentuate her movements. By way of a sculptural, artistic access to the material of dance, Hoffmann composes movements like picture sequences. A precise language of forms compresses the content of her solo choreographies. Whereas, in Bretter she exposes herself to a body extension of extreme dimensions and shifts of focus, in Steine she wrestles with centrifugal and gravitational forces. Intensionally she used the sounds of the material as a musical composition. Both works, created in 1980, have been fully documented on video. From a contemporary perspective on these works, Hoffmann elaborates the essence of the dance pieces through a specific selection of video stills in the exhibition; in the choreographic transformation, the artist compresses and reinterprets the iconographic and semantic readability of these works in an image plate.

The dancer, choreographer and director Reinhild Hoffmann (*1943 in Sorau/Silesia) received her training from Eleonore Härdle-Munz in Karlsruhe and from Kurt Joos at Folkwang University in Essen. From 1978 till 1986 she directed the Bremer Tanz Theater, for the first three years in co-direction with Gerhard Bohner. Thanks to their aesthetic lucidity, Hoffmann’s pieces developed in Bremen and afterwards at Schauspielhaus Bochum made a contribution to the international recognition of German dance theater. She resides in Berlin and primarily directs the local Musiktheater since 1995. She stages Wagner’s Lohengrin at the same time as Moments at the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe.