The stilt dance collective DANZANKÓ was founded by Esther Geyer (DE/ES), Clara Gracia
(ES) and Anna Vilhelmiina Peltola (FIN) in 2020. The three dancers and performers have been working for many years in the fields of contemporary dance as well as street and site-specific dance theatre – with and without stilts.
They all share a passion for dancing on stilts and aim to introduce it to a wider audience. In addition, by performing in public space, they want to create a framework in which the encounter between performers and audience can be detached from rigid forms and at the same time deepened.
In 2021 all three performers received a DIS-TANZ-SOLO grant in the programme NEUSTART KULTUR, Hilfsprogramm DIS-TANZEN of the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland for their research focusing on developing a method of dancing on stilts.
Their first production DisTouched was premiered in summer 2022 at Artspace Bremerhaven and has since been presented at the international theatre festival Sommerwerft, Kulturufer Friedrichshafen and Micro!Festival in Dortmund, among others.
In 2023 they received the Wiederaufnahmeförderung from the Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR.
In the same year they were able to deepen their research and continue developing their method with the help of a renewed DIS-TANZ-SOLO grant.
Clara is a Spanish actress, performer and dancer. She successfully completed her studies at the State School of Drama Institut del Teatre in Barcelona in 2010. She has been involved in various dance-theater projects led by artists such as Takahashi, Meredith Nadler, Ingo Reulecke, Alexandra Rauh, Stella Zannou, Valentina Bordenave and Heike Scharpff. In 2012 she founded the Kazibaze Theater collective together with Marina Rodríguez, with which she developed various family theater pieces. Since 2015 she has also been a member of the international theater groups Grotest Maru and Theater Anu.
www.claragracia.org
Esther is a freelance actress, dancer, performer and moderator. She completed her acting studies (MA) at the State School of Drama in Seville and the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. She works both in German-speaking and international contexts and has participated in numerous theater productions and dance-theater projects led by artists such as Lionel Ménard, Heike Scharpff, Sybille Günther, Juan Carlos Malpelli, Daniel Koch. From 2019 to 2021 she was a lecturer at the Anton-Bruckner University in Linz for the subject of movement technique and body language. Since 2018 she has been a member of the international theater ensemble Grotest Maru.
www.esthergeyer.com
Anna is a Finnish dancer and performer. She completed her stage dance training – with a focus on modern and contemporary dance – in 2013 at DANCEWORKS berlin under the direction of Carol Ellys. In 2015, she continued her education with the MASA Dance Journey program of the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company in Israel and worked with artists such as Eyal Dadon, Noa Zuk, Oded Graf, Sharon Vaisvaser and Rina Schenfeld. At present, her focus is on physical and site-specific theater as well as stilt performance and she works throughout Germany and Europe with Grotest Maru, Pantao, Dulce Compania, as well as with choreographer/ videographer Eric Dunlap.
www.annavilhelmiinapeltola.com