[Translate to English:]
Beatrix Simkó »It Contains Hard Parts«, Foto: Dániel Dömölky

Dance Research NRW

International scholarship programme for dance artists

The international scholarship programme offers dancers, performers and choreographers the opportunity to spend several weeks a year researching independently of a production.

The focus is on aesthetic and social spaces of exploration and discourse. The artistic research projects should relate to one or more member cities of the NRW KULTURsekretariat, with the specific possibilities on site. The focus is on the development of research-related skills and sustainable partnerships.

As part of Dance Research NRW #50, entitled "Dancing towards ethical cross-cultural collaboration", Heidi Seppälä from Finland and Emmanuel Ndefo from Nigeria will examine aspects of the decolonisation of the dance space in Cologne. For Dance Research NRW #51 "Everything is Movement for me: Embodying, Moving, Drawing with Charcoal (Coal Mining)", Taiwanese choreographer Jodie Judy Lu YingChu is researching approaches to interdisciplinary and experimental dance art. While international teams of choreographers explore NRW with this research, two local artists will go in search of clues abroad. Frederico Mendes Teixeira from Essen is travelling to Rio de Janeiro to use his Dance Research NRW #52 entitled "The Lennie Dale Scores - celebrating queerness and empowerment in Brazil" to search for the potential of cultural empowerment in unfavourable contexts. Finally, Cologne-based choreographer Maria Mercedes Flores Mujica dives into the subject area of "Healing / Feminism / Liberation of the Pelvis" with her research project #53 "Deep into Unheard Cosmologies" in Cairo.

The "Dance Research NRW" programme is explicitly not production-related. Since the programme was introduced in 2009, the focus has been on researching artistic themes and developing working methods. The programme offers grants of up to 6,000 euros, depending on the type and scope of the research. The tender for 2025 ran from 26 August to 26 September 2024.

As the supervising central contact point, the NRWKS arranges meetings and discussions with artists and cultural institutions from a wide range of disciplines and research institutions and supports the final public or digital presentations.