Joana Tischkau

Choreographer, dancer – Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Participant International Forum 2018

Joana Tischkau, born in Göttingen in 1983, is a choreographer and performer. From a young age, she has been dancing at youth centres, hip hop clubs and discos, onstage in semi-professional contexts or at the dancing school next door. She received her formal dance training and a BA in Dance and Acting at Coventry University in Great Britain. She currently lives in Frankfurt, where she is using an MA course to explore how social urban dance practise and pop-culture can be interwoven with intersectional feminisms and postcolonial theories to form an artistic practise. She mainly choreographs her own pieces, such as the solo “WHAT.YEAH”, which was invited to the festival WORKS AT WORK at Dansehallerne Copenhagen in 2014, and TPFKAWY/Thepieceformerlyknownaswhatyeah, which was presented at Hessische Theatertage in Darmstadt in 2017. Both pieces subversively blend culture codes and meanings, attempting to relieve the female POC body of its inscribed legibility. She also works with young refugees and Germans in a variety of contexts of theatre and dance education. These activities also allow her to explore questions of anti-racist practises in working with young people and the search for formats which raise these questions.