Henriette Horn

Choreographer – dancer – teacher

Henrietta Horn studies elementary dance at the German Sport University in Cologne. She then completed a stage dance course at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen. Already during her studies she created her first own choreographic works, which were awarded with renowned prizes. Henrietta Horn received a special award in 2008 with the “Female Artists’ Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia for choreography/contemporary dance”.

From 1999 to 2008 Henrietta Horn took over the artistic direction of the Folkwang Tanzstudio together with Pina Bausch. During this time, numerous choreographies for the ensemble were created, accompanied by international guest performances. As a solo dancer, she remains active during and after her time at the Folkwang Tanzstudio. In addition to numerous performances with her piece “Solo”, other solo choreographies are created between 2007 and 2016, such as “Schimmer”, “Treibschatten”, “Rotlicht” and in 2016 the mediale Dance evening “Emperor’s clothes”.

Henrietta Horn is regularly invited as a guest choreographer, both nationally (Theater Bremen, Gießen, Braunschweig, etc.) and internationally (London, Taipei, Damascus, La Paz, Anakara, etc.).

In 2013 she was commissioned with the reconstruction of “Le Sacre du Printemps”, choreographed by Mary Wigman in 1957, to be performed at the theaters in Osnabrück, Bielefeld and the Bavarian State Ballet in Munich. In 2017 and 2019 she again reconstructs choreographies by Mary Wigman. Under the title “Danse Macabre” two dances of death by Wigman from the years 1917/21 and 1926 will be performed in the Osnabrück Theater in 2017. In 2019 “DIE FEIER” (1927/28) will be staged again after 90 years.
In 2017, together with Prof. Dr. Stephan Brinkmann the first dance symposium at the Folkwang University of the Arts Essen under the title “Folkwang Dance – Technique, Attitude, Future”

In addition to choreographic works and themes from the history of dance, Henrietta Horn seeks to engage with other art forms. Since 2012 she has been researching new forms of expression of movement in interactive space together with sound and video artists. In her solo evening “Emperor’s Clothing” and the commissioned media work “Untier”, movement, sound and image combine to form an aesthetic of its own, interactive, fragmentary, medial and human at the same time. She left the controlled level of choreography in 2014. Together with a changing group of dancers and musicians, she explored the compositional spaces of improvisation. In museums, churches, halls, the artists ask themselves questions about rules, perspectives, what is permitted and what is not permitted, freedom and demands.

As a teacher, she also questions the relationship between composition, improvisation and dramaturgy with the students. She works as a teacher at the Folkwang University of the Arts/Essen and at the German Sport University in Cologne. In 2015 she was appointed guest professor for contemporary dance at the TNUA Taipei/Taiwan.