Collective

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.