#Feature: From Dramaturgy to Curating: Composing a Collective Movement

An interview with Tanztriennale artistic co-directors Gwen Hsin-Yi Chang and Monica Gillette

Dramaturgy is both a concept rooted in the Western theatrical tradition and a role embedded within many German municipal theatres. Emerging from the same cultural context, Tanztheater evolved through the work of pioneers such as Rudolf von Laban and Pina Bausch, expanding choreography beyond movement to embrace drama, spoken language, singing, and even everyday gestures. Through dramaturgy, a choreographer's ideas and observations of society and human nature are woven into coherent narrative structures that audiences can read, feel and experience.

At the end of September 2024, Tanztriennale announced independent curator Gwen Hsin-Yi Chang and dramaturg-facilitator Monica Gillette as its artistic co-directors and curators. Nine years after returning to Taiwan with extensive international touring experience gained while living in Germany, Chang joined the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying) as International Relations Manager, where she initiated platforms including Taiwan Dance Platform and Weiwuying Circus Platform, fostering exchanges between local and international artists. Since returning to Europe in 2021, she has remained active as a member of international networks including Aerowaves and Circus Asia Network (CAN), while continuing her work as an independent curator, dramaturg and producer.

Gillette, currently a dramaturg at Tanzhaus Zürich, brings twelve years of experience as both a professional dancer and choreographer. Her background as a documentary film editor has also shaped a distinctive approach to narrative, structure and dramaturgical thinking.

Rather than approaching Tanztriennale through the conventional logic of festival programming, Chang and Gillette drew upon years of experience across the performing arts ecosystem to imagine something far broader. Their curatorial vision extends the dialogue of individual performances to the scale of an entire city, cultivating a community in Hamburg and inviting people to arrive at Tanztriennale together, one step at a time.

Dance Dramaturgy: Translation, Dialogue and Contextual Thinking

For Gwen Hsin-Yi Chang, the role of a dance dramaturg extends far beyond expanding the dimensions of a work. It lies in challenging and conversing with the choreographer, helping a piece gain greater depth while widening its capacity to communicate. Yet when the concept of dramaturgy—shaped within the European performing arts tradition—arrived in Taiwan, it did not seamlessly take root. In a dance ecosystem where resources had long been comparatively limited, the practice required considerable adaptation.

"Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium all have their own systems," Chang explains. "Taiwan has only gradually developed a collaborative model that responds to its own context."

Just as German dramaturgy often engages deeply with history and contemporary society, while Dutch practice tends to embrace openness and collective creation, Taiwan has also needed to localise the role. For Chang, what Taiwanese artists need is less an authoritative outside eye than "a partner in dialogue."

A dramaturg broadens an artist's perspective, but more importantly, helps reorganise intuitive ideas into a coherent narrative framework, and creates pathways through which a work can speak to the wider world.

Chang points to several examples from Taiwan's dance scene. Working with choreographer Cheng Tsung-lung, dramaturg Chen Pin-Hsiu consistently brought historical perspectives into the creative process, enriching the multiple layers through which audiences could read the work. Meanwhile, dramaturg Fan Xiang-Jun's long-standing collaboration with choreographer Jeff, Chieh-Hua Hsieh  has developed a remarkable creative effort. No matter how far Hsieh's ideas venture, Fan is able to identify the emotional and conceptual core, opening space for audiences to connect with the work on a profoundly human level.

At the same time, Chang is careful to emphasise that dramaturgy is not an essential requirement for every choreographer. "Many artists already possess strong critical thinking skills," she says. "They are capable of questioning, reflecting and analysing their own creative process." Ideally, she believes, both approaches can coexist, even if in practice they often involve ongoing negotiations over artistic authorship and creative direction.

"For me, the essence of dramaturgy is to create a space for dialogue. Through listening, communication and mutual trust, both sides can gradually arrive at a shared understanding."

Unlike Chang, whose understanding of dramaturgy has evolved largely through curatorial and intercultural practice, Monica Gillette approaches the role from the perspective of both performer and creator. Drawing on her own experience as a dancer and choreographer, she thinks of dramaturgy as a support system designed to nurture artistic creation.

She recalls working with people living with Parkinson's disease. For individuals whose movement is inherently restricted, limitation itself became a catalyst for imagination. "Their bodies may be rigid, trembling or capable of only slow movement," she says. "Yet those very limitations encourage artists to discover entirely new possibilities for movement, while opening broader questions about illness, society and the many layers of human experience."

For Gillette, the dramaturg's most essential role is to support the artist's imagination. "We need to create a space where artists feel free to think—where they feel safe enough for a work to gradually emerge."

As for both Chang and Gillette, this philosophy extends naturally into curating. Every curatorial decision begins with the same question: how do we create a space where meaningful dialogue can happen?

Curatorial Dramaturgy: Creating Spaces for Dialogue and Responding to Our Time

Although Tanztriennale grew out of the former Tanzkongress—a closed professional forum for the German dance community—the festival itself, held in Hamburg from 14 to 21 June 2026, began long before its opening week. In fact, its first steps were taken as early as June 2025.

"Within our dramaturgical approach to curating, bringing people into Tanztriennale is never just about those final eight days," Monica Gillette explains. "Performances alone cannot bring people into dance. The real question is how we arrive here together. That takes time, collective action, participation—and experiences that leave a trace in the body."

With this in mind, Chang and Gillette developed a year-long programme of activities that gradually invited the city itself into dance.

"Curating isn't about deciding on a theme and then finding works to fit it," says Chang. "It's a dynamic process that grows out of the questions of the present moment and the social climate surrounding us." Her starting point is simple: there is no dance without bodies. Rather than beginning with performances, they chose to begin with embodied experiences—as a way of awakening the city and cultivating a sense of community.

The programme reached audiences from many different backgrounds. All Moves, an open participatory event for Hamburg residents, recently hosted a “Krump” session that attracted more than eighty participants of all ages and backgrounds, offering many their first encounter with the dance form. The monthly Moving Meeting brings together practitioners from different dance disciplines for exchange, while the residency programme Counter Balance creates space for artists from diverse fields to collaborate and inspire one another.

"Our communication goal has been to help people across the city discover different dance cultures and movement practices over a year," Gillette says. "We wanted people to experience the joy and rhythm of dancing for themselves, while creating opportunities for artists to meet face-to-face, ask questions and begin conversations. Step by step, this is how a community is built."

In this sense, Tanztriennale is merely the final destination. The curatorial work lies in everything that happens beforehand. Another important task of the festival is to recover the cultural and historical contexts that often disappear beneath aesthetic labels. Chang points to hip-hop as an example. "When everything becomes simplified or reduced to labels, we lose important layers of understanding," she says. "Hip-hop, for instance, has travelled from a bodily practice rooted in specific communities to becoming a consumable cultural product."

For this reason, workshops became an essential part of the curatorial framework. Rather than introducing dance styles only on stage, the team sought to build audiences' understanding before they entered the theatre—allowing performances to resonate more deeply and opening space for further discussion and reflection.

"Every selected program has to negotiate simultaneously," Chang explains. "It needs to speak to Hamburg as a city, to Germany as a national context, to an international conversation, and ultimately to the audience."

The final programme therefore reflects not only artistic excellence but also a carefully constructed dramaturgy of ideas, revealing the team's ongoing dialogue with the social and political questions of our time.

The festival's curatorial theme—Brave Moves. Courageous Joy.—also emerged gradually through this year-long process rather than being determined at the outset. Gillette recalls a dance intervention by choreographer Nora Chipaumire, creator of Dambudzo, presented in collaboration with the Triennial of Photography Hamburg. Through dance and live music, Chipaumire transformed what had been a conventional conference into a shared embodied experience. When she passed the microphone to the audience, the first woman to speak admitted: "I almost didn't come because I thought I'd be alone. But now I don't feel alone anymore." Afterwards, another participant approached to acknowledge her courage it had taken to speak.

"For us, that was the moment Tanztriennale became clear," Gillette reflects. "We began thinking about what courage really means. When you witness these small acts of participation happening again and again, you realise that the joy created through intervention is itself an act of courage. In a time marked by political instability and uncertainty in everyday life, that kind of courage feels incredibly precious."

From that moment, “Brave Moves. Courageous Joy.” became more than a slogan. It became an invitation to experience courage collectively, and to discover the joy that emerges when people choose to move together.

Ultimately, the festival asks what role dance can play in everyday life, and how it might reshape our understanding of education, the body, democracy and even war.

"We create a space where dialogue can happen," Gillette says. "What brings us together? What do our bodies feel? Those are the questions that matter." For her, Tanztriennale is not simply a festival or a platform, but a community that invites people to improvise together. "In the end, we hope to connect people through shared values."

Reflecting on what Taiwan might learn from European practices, Chang believes there is no need to replicate Western dramaturgical systems. What matters is continuing to cultivate a "second voice" within the creative process.

"Whether it means bringing critical reflection into emotionally driven creation, or introducing human care into rigorous formal structures, it is through dialogue and sustained reflection that dance can move beyond aesthetic expression and become an art form capable of responding to society and to its time."

Original article

Published by PAR