"I can hardly wait for everyone to come together to start the 2024 dance year" – Melanie Zimmermann on her first festival edition

Dear Audience, 
Dear Dance-Makers and Dance-Lovers,

Welcome to the Real Dance Festival – Hannover’s new festival for international dance! 
In January 2024, the first edition presents dances from diverse cultures and styles, including contemporary dance, hip hop and voguing, linking them with the latest choreographic approaches. The Festival offers a platform for the widest range of dance forms, promoting dialogue among established artists and the rising generation alike.

In Hallucinations of an Artifact, for example, the internationally active Indian choreographer Mandeep Raihky enquires into traditional depictions of dance, and speculates, with the aid of choreographic and artificial intelligence, about new representations from queer perspectives. In TARAB, the Iranian artist Ulduz Ahmadzadeh brings pre-Islamic and contemporary dances clashing together, accompanied by the sounds of percussion virtuoso Mohammad Reza Mortazavi. The result is a thrillingly pulsating and at the same time poetic evening of dance that will enthuse both newcomers to dance and professionals. 
A firm favourite of international festivals, Saïdo Lehlouh proves that hip hop can look authentic on major theatre stages. For his Hannover version of Apaches, he selected a cast from over 180 applications from representatives of many styles, including hip hop, breakdance, voguing and other street cultures. A finely constructed aesthetic ode to the collapse of the separation between high culture and subculture. You were, we assume, already aware that there is a remarkable Ballroom scene in Hannover in the form of OVAH Hannover? The Festival has invited this community to celebrate Hannover’s biggest Kiki Ball of all time – with real stars from the USA, La Réunion, France and Holland. 

Over the five days of REAL DANCE, we want to create as many entryways into dance as possible, showing the art not just in its best light but also within the contexts in which it takes shape. What appears out of this is a multiplicity of dance realities that overlap over the course of the Festival for you to experience in combination with each other. Which is why we invite you not just to the guest performances but also to talks, workshops, parties and, naturally, to the Ballhof Eins theatre in the Festival Centre, where you can warm up and recharge with even more art. In addition to a screen-printing machine, where you can have the Festival logo printed on your favourite shirt, you will encounter the visual artist Franziska Nast, who presents works and motifs that she has developed specially for the Festival under the title “rrrrrealdirrrrrtydancingfeet”. One part of her artistic practice is tattooing – which means you can have her art immortalised under your skin right here. 

I’m eagerly anticipating the arrival of the invited artists, who have such varied approaches to dance and are developing and experiencing dance in diverse contexts. And I can hardly wait for everyone to come together here in Hannover in January to kick off the 2024 dance year with us.

Melanie Zimmermann