Azad Ümit Yesilmen | Fernanda Ortiz | Sahra Bazyar-Planke | Teresa Hoffmann | Venetsiana Kalampaliki

OPEN CLASS: DANCE WELL

"Well-being" is intrinsic to dance: Dance Well is a dance programme that encourages people to experience their own body in its individual mobility and is also explicitly aimed at people living with Parkinson's disease, their families, carers, friends and anyone else who would like to experience dance at any age, with or without previous experience: Dance movements are developed together and coordination and rhythm are trained. The physical characteristics of each person are integrated in an appreciative way and used as potential for new possibilities of movement. Above all: we dance, dance, dance together!

Dance Well is explicitly aimed at people with PD, their families, carers and friends. But it is also for anyone who would like to experience dance at any age, with or without previous experience.

Open for people with and without Parkinson's |
No previous experience required 

Approximate timeframe within a class:
15 Min. entering the space
45 Min. practice
10 Min. break
30 Min. choreography/performance
20 Min. feedback/goodbye

Azad Ümit Yesilmen

is a dancer and part of the national and international urban dance scene. Various dance styles such as popping, house, voguing, breaking, new style hustle and hip hop form the basis of his work.

Azad is part of the Dance Well project. Print his course he focuses on time. By slowing down, he learns that new spaces are opening up in order to get out of the rhythm of everyday life and experience oneself and their surroundings more vividly.

Fernanda Ortiz

is a freelance dancer and choreographer. Her artistic practice between the performing and visual arts focuses on the human being, his perception, his movements and his body in relation to socio-social phenomena. Since 2019 she has been running the K3 youth club. She is part of the project Dance Well and wants to bring dance to people and places where it is not so common.

Sahra Bazyar-Planke

is an occupational therapist, dance teacher and dance artist from Hamburg. Over the last few years she has specialized in teaching contemporary dance to people with restricted mobility. Since 2022 she has been running Hamburg's first professional mixed-abled dance company in cooperation with Soi Anifantis-Scherb. She is also part of the project Dance Well. In her artistic practice, Sahra’s main focus is giving dancers the courage to be creative and to express themselves individually. Sahra's aim in the dance well course is to create a space for her dancers that is value-free and does not put any pressure on them, so that they can become one with their body and are able to experience its expressive possibilities.

Teresa Hoffmann

first studied psychology in Würzburg and New York, then performance studies in Hamburg. She works as a dancer, choreographer and dance mediator. Since 2016, she has mainly focussed on producing dance pieces for and sometimes with young people. For her, the relationship and difference between the worlds of adults and children is paradigmatic of her interest in being confronted with ways of thinking, moving and feeling that she has forgotten or forgotten as an adult. The encounter of strangers of different ages and abilities is a mirror for the fine threads that connect them and for the creative power that lies hidden in these unusual connections.

^{(Status: 2023)}

Venetsiana Kalampaliki

is a dancer and choreographer based in Athens. She is a graduate of the School of Economics and Political Sciences of the University of Athens and the Greek National School of Dance and continues her research with a Master in Fine Arts at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her collaborations extend in the fields of contemporary dance, digital and visual arts, performance and disability arts alongside the development of her personal artistic practice. Her latest project Re-call was presented at the 7th New Choreographers Festival of the Onassis Stegi, the Holland Dance Festival and is currently on tour.

During her K3 residency, Venetsiana aims to develop methodologies that consider accessibility from the beginning of an artistic process and make use of the specific aesthetic qualities. Observing links between accessibility, the city and the cultural scene in terms of participation, she will focus on the urban area in order to become familiar with the variety of needs and desires of mixed audience members.

^{(Status: 2021)}