Urban Arts Ensemble, tanz nrw und Charles Petersohn And The Children Of Zu Zu

Wuppertal, 11 April 2025: Exciting collaborations are on the programme of the Pina Bausch Centre ‘under construction’ in May. Guests include the festival tanz nrw 2025, the Urban Arts Ensemble Ruhr, the first release concert with Charles Petersohn And The Children Of Zu Zu and the co-creative work process ‘What is a Pina Bausch Cen-tre’.

EXPOSURE, Urban Arts Ensemble - 7 May 2025, 8:00 pm

In EXPOSURE, contemporary dance, Afro-Cuban tradition and spectacular hip-hop culture meet to the live sounds of star composer and film musician Ben Frost in a physical staging by choreographic greats Julio César Iglesias Ungo and Hans van den Broeck. EXPOSURE is the fourth world premiere of the Urban Arts Ensemble Ruhr, which was founded in 2023 as Germany's first state-funded professional ensemble from the hip-hop culture. It meets the Danza Contemporánea de Cuba from Havana, a dance company known for its Cuban mo-dern dance techniques that has been honoured with over 70 awards worldwide. The new stage work is a radical-physical search for our primal instincts and their release. The audience experiences an immediately moving ceremony of how much nature still lives in us humans. With great physical commitment - immersed in charged and meditative sound spaces - the dancers open up an intimate view into their identity and their connection to each other. In doing so, they raise the question of what it would be like to be able to drop masks and feel what our bodies have forgotten. Lifelines, dreams and stories touch each other and do not need dialogue to be understood. The performance of EXPOSURE is a journey to the human being, to life itself.

THE DAY I BECAME A CLOUD by Emanuele Soavi as part of the tanz nrw festival - 14 and 15 May 2025, 7:30 pm

On 14 and 15 May, Emanuele Soavi's performance will be a guest at the Pina Bausch Centre ‘under construction’ as part of tanz nrw 25, combined with a post-show talk. On Tuesday, 13.05.2025, at 12:00, there will also be the mediation programme tanz.backstage for THE DAY I BECAME A CLOUD. The piece was created at the invitation of the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris and the Max Ernst Museum Brühl. Together with sound artist Johannes Malfatti, the dancers led by choreographer Emanuele Soavi explore the theme of ‘surviving and remaining visible’. How can we be and remain visible - individually and collectively, as artists and as human beings? For the tanz nrw 25 festival, the parcours of dance, performance, language and an impressive sound installation will move into unusual performance spaces such as the future Pina Bausch Centre in Wuppertal, which will also make the principle of presence and absence tangible through its architecture. The choreographer and performer Emanuele Soavi - based in Cologne - has been working with his team in cooperation with (inter)national artists since 2012 in various formats on interdisciplinary, structural and artistic networking, at a local, regional, national and international level.

About tanz nrw: The tenth festival edition of tanz nrw will present a wide range of contemporary dance from all over North Rhine-Westphalia from 8 to 18 May 2025. The tanz nrw network model consists of ten theatres such as tanzhaus nrw and PACT Zollverein, municipal cultural offices and nrw landesbuero tanz. It has been creating a cross-city platform for contemporary dance in NRW for two decades. The network partner in Wuppertal is the cultural office with the commissioned dancers and choreographers Thusnelda Mercy and Pascal Merighi. Dance will be shown Open Air and Inside, at Utopiastadt, Tanz Station - Barmer Bahnhof, INSEL and the Pina Bausch Centre. A total of 16 productions, including two world premieres, will be travelling throughout North Rhine-Westphalia. The companies will present their current works in nine cities in North Rhine-Westphalia. In addition, the research and work residency SPRUNGBRETT enables the scholarship holders to spend two weeks in Münster and Essen and to present their research at several festival venues. Further information about tanz nrw, the performances at INSEL, UTOPI-ASTADT and TANZ STATION and about the piece.

Release Konzert von Charles Petersohn And The Children Of Zu Zu – 31 May, 2025, 7:30 pm

The musician, sound designer, DJ, curator and event organiser Charles Petersohn has once again ventured into the international music world with this record, on which he combines an enormous range of musical styles with six tracks. The advance praise from England, France, Japan and elsewhere shortly after the release reads very promisingly. The first release in 18 years - an international restart.

On Saturday, 31 May, he will be celebrating this music live at the Pina Bausch Centre with his new six-piece band Children Of Zu Zu. Maria Basel (keyboards), Antonia Nickel (drums), Maxime von Koblinski (percussion), Amaka aka AdaSoul (vocals), Luca Greco (mix + sam-ples) and Charles Petersohn (digital bass + vocals) will play unreleased songs in the atrium of the former Schauspielhaus foyer alongside tracks from the album. Petersohn has always loved to mix styles, to merge them into something unique, sometimes new. After the concert, you can also experience the light art of RaumZeitPiraten Tobias Daemgen in the foyer and the Japanese garden of the theatre to ambient music by Brian Eno, Charles Petersohn him-self and other artists. The Daniel Schmitt photo exhibition will also be on show. The anticipation for this concert is great, combining electronic dance music with spiritual jazz, African and Brazilian rhythms and ambient music. With the help of sound design, the music will also be transported to different places: to a marketplace somewhere in Africa, to the side streets of São Paulo during the Brazilian carnival or into space, into the vast expanses of the universe. But what is Zu Zu? This term comes from the spiritual world of the multicultural city of New Orleans. It is about ‘spiritual healing’, ‘universal love’ and, for Charles Petersohn himself, also about the heat of the night. In a nightclub where many things don't seem real, but everything seems okay.

Last but not least, it is not only the record that is a return, but also this concert. At the Schauspielhaus, the Pina Bausch Centre under construction, he organised the solidarity work for the artistic director Christian von Treskow with other Wuppertal cultural workers, here he was allowed to produce his first theatre music, for Shakespeare's Macbeth directed by Clau-dia Bauer, with the Theater Anderwelten he was the musician for the play German Song, in which Chrystel Guillebeaud also took part. And finally, he played one of only two concerts there with the Dutch jazz legend Jasper van't Hof for their joint album delirious.

A co-operation between the Pina Bausch Foundation, LOCH Ug, Thöne & Partner and the Caritasverband Wuppertal/Solingen e.V.

The Pina Bausch Centre is a project of the City of Wuppertal, funded by the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, in cooperation with the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch and the Pina Bausch Foundation.

https://pinabauschzentrum.de/en
https://under-construction-wuppertal.de/en