Entdecke Julek Kreutzers Profil

Born and raised in Berlin, choreographer Julek Kreutzer started dancing as a young kid, studied shortly at the interdisciplinary private school Die Etage before getting into the Bachelor of HZT. Throughout, there has always been a longing to get away from the city for a while. I speak to her over zoom, because currently she is in Amsterdam participating in the two-year master’s program Das Arts Choreography.

 

“When I applied for Das Arts I really felt I was in a crisis. I felt grief, literally grief, of losing people. But also grief in relation to my work context in Berlin and Germany, that had built up since Covid19. Big part of my work life was teaching and I always felt that the work we do, especially teaching dance in rural areas, impacted children’s relationships with their bodies and with each other. After three months of pandemic the German football league started to play again, but I couldn’t teach again. That made it painfully clear how unimportant our field is considered to be. The latest cuts on culture underline that. The crisis extends to the political situation in the world; how discourse is pulled to the right.”

 

For Das Arts, Julek looks into the presentation and the rhetoric of far-right politicians. It‘s part of her two years research project NOISE, which grew out of the necessity to understand the crisis and dissociation and find ways of dealing with it. To use hope, humor, vulnerability and togetherness to be able to continue working in these times of chaos.

Essential to the work of Julek is the exploration of new ways of working together and practicing solidarity. Apart from being a maker, she stresses the importance of being a performer in other people’s work. To use her body and mind to think through somebody and find images and movement for others.

“Performing gives me access to connect deeply with the material of others, but also with everyone in the process. Because we all work together very intensely on something that is outside of us, we start to practice solidarity and support. We practice society. To me that is political.”

That ideology also is the base of the new Berlin initiative bottom up productions (BUP), that Julek founded with Felipe Fizkal and Chichiro Araki. With BUP, they invite a choreographer to make a work for and with them, while taking the productional and financial side away from the choreographer.

“bottom up productions is a playing ground on which we try to find other ways of collaborations. Our aim is to share resources and responsibilities and have a less hierarchical way of working. For our first production Inner Mining, we invited Jule Flierl to be the choreographer, we applied for funds, we are in contact with theaters and gave first impulses to the content. Since there are not many auditions in Berlin, this also gives us a chance to work with people that are outside our personal realm but that we are interested in working with. We would love it if for example 15 people can be involved, sharing roles, and getting multiple choreographers on board. We’re testing those modalities now, and we have to see how it goes, but I’m hopeful. The latest work is O que resta do fogo with performer Maria Giulia Serantoni and choreographed by Isabela Fernandes Santana”

 

This search for new ways of producing is also apparent in the research at DAS. Although Julek is developing a solo work, she cannot do it alone. So, she invites guests, some with whom she shares a long history, some that she met only recently.

 

“I organise encounters and try to be as transparent as I can be in the conditions of those meetings, the way we organise our time together and what I’m looking for in those moments. With many of my guests I’ve collaborated before, and I was part of their work. These encounters reflect how our relationship has grown and that is visible in the work.”

The time and dedication she can give to the work, couldn’t have happened in Berlin. With the current cuts the situation has even become more precarious than it was before. But with distance, the appreciation for Berlin also grows. For her colleagues, for bigger and smaller institutions. For Zeitgenössischer Tanz Berlin (ZTB) e.V., which is fighting for the rights of the dance scene. For Tanzbüro, which puts a lot of energy in making life of artists less precarious, for Radialsystem and ada studios, which offers residencies and open practices for free.

 

“There is so much rearranging in the scene at the moment. We start to realise even more that we need to rely on each other. A lot of people are putting a lot of time and effort in this, and for that I have deep respect.”

 

It makes the work of how to practice new modes of producing, solidarity and allyship all the more important.
 

Veröffentlicht im März 2026. Text von Annette van Zwoll.