Dieter Heitkamp is a Professor for contemporary dance at the University for Music and Performing Arts Frankfurt a.M. and director of the Department for Contemporary and Classical Dance| ZuKT since 2001. Parallel, he is on the Board of Directors of Tanzlabor_21/ Tanzbasis Frankfurt_ Rhein_Main since 2006 and in 2009 he initiated the interdisciplinary research platform THE ARTIST’S BODY tab.hfmdk-frankfurt.info.

Over 30 years he has been involved with studying, teaching and performing Contact Improvisation (CI). His on-going interest in developing and documenting CI as a social dance form and a choreographic tool took a new direction, with contactencyclopedia.net, which he developed in cooperation with Norbert Pape and with the support of the HfMDK Frankfurt a.M.

For 20 years (78–98) he worked with Tanzfabrik Berlin as a choreographer, dancer, teacher, collective member and one of the artistic directors (until 1995). Besides creating over 18 full evening length pieces for Tanzfabrik,
he also worked as a guest choreographer for Ballet Frankfurt / „Pizza Girl“, choreographed two theatre productions (Peter Palitzsch, Holger Schulze)
at Freie Volksbühne Berlin and made works for Video and TV. In 1997 he created both the choreography and the set design for „Le Disperazioni del Signor Pulcinella“, a ballet by Hans Werner Henze, for the State Opera Berlin. In his choreographies and lecture performances Dieter Heitkamp combines movement, text, concepts, images, objects, light, film and music. His choreographies have been presented throughout Germany, in 15 European countries, Canada, the USA, Japan, Hongkong and Brazil.

He was a founding member of the German Forum for Contemporary Dance in the 90ies, is a member of ITI Germany and ID_Frankfurt/ Independent Dance and also worked as curator for Tanzplan Deutschland, Fonds Darstellende Künste and Kunststiftung NRW.

Artistic Director 3. Dance Education Biennale, AK|T Speaker and Training

Photo: Bettina Stoess