CocoonDance Company

The performance art collective CocoonDance was founded by choreographer Rafaële Giovanola and dramaturg Rainald Endraß in 2000. Since then they are producing in the independent Theater im Ballsaal in Bonn (D) and from 2004 on they are also in charge of the dance program. An important pillar of the company is located in the Swiss Canton of Valais, where CocoonDance has been co-produced and supported since 2005. Under these conditions CocoonDance has established itself as a dance-art institution with an extensive network of freelance guest artists, national and international co-producers and collaborations around the world, but also in the field of cultural education as in numerous projects with its two Junior companies (D/ CH) as well partnerships with local schools.

Since its founding, the company has produced about fifty full-length productions that have toured through five continents and been invited to showcase festivals in Germany and Switzerland like the TANZPLATTFORM DEUTSCHLAND in 2018 and 2020 or STEPS festival in 2022.

The driving force behind these 22 years of artistic development are the pronounced focus on improvisation and continuous teamwork. The work of CocoonDance can best be explained as a reflection about the dance and the body itself, as a shift of the dance space away from the narrative space into a space of distance and thinking. Since 2016 CocoonDance elaborates a working method which becomes crucial. In intensive research periods the company explores movement techniques that are often alien to dance. Through physical encounters with unfamiliar forms of movement and “other”, non-academically trained dance bodies, the search of the “unthought body” led Rafaële Giovanola and her ensemble to an expanded understanding of the body and movement. Bodies that are transformed into something new and alien, which allow us to recognize and question traditional body images and the social construction of body and gender.

Since 2017 the company is developing a movement vocabulary based on the movement material of its pieces, which can be used to create, explain and share a choreographic language. The ultimate intention here is to create an open archive that not only stores the collectively gained knowledge, but is constantly dialogically re-examined, supplemented and shared. The MoveApp, an interactive digital advanced form of the glossary work, aims to assist users to explore and expand the possibility space of their bodies through terms and their explanations.

www.cocoondance.de

As of August 2022