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Hilde Holger – Migration, Survival, Resistance with THOMAS KAMPE & CLAUDIA KAPPENBERG
Research Project
Week 2 10:00 – 16:00
Hilde Holger – Migration, Survival, Resistance is a collaborative research project led by interdisciplinary artist Claudia Kappenberg & Thomas Kampe, which returns to and an-archives the work of Vienna-born choreographer Hilde Holger (1905–2001), a Jewish modern dance pioneer whose work embodies survival, resistance, and transformation through dance.
Holger was a prolific dancer and pedagogue in Vienna in the 1920s and 30s, creating over 80 choreographic works. She trained at Gertrud Bodenwieser's private school and later at the ground-breaking interdisciplinary dance programme of the State Academy. In 1926, she founded her own experimental Neue Schule für Bewegungskunst – New School for Movement Art in Vienna with her colleague Grete Kollmann, eventually teaching clandestinely under fascism between 1938 and 1939. Forced to flee Vienna for India in 1939 and settling in London in 1948, her pedagogy evolved as an interdisciplinary practice of resilience, hope and cultural inclusivity.
Drawing from Kappenberg and Kampe’s personal collaborations with Holger in the 1990s, as well as archival video materials, interviews, and site-based research in London, Mumbai, and Vienna, this research project explores how her modernist ethics of care, inclusion, and creativity can inform contemporary artistic and social practices.
We ask how choreography – understood as a process of world-making (Klein & Noeth, 2011) – can generate new relational, embodied, and ethical spaces for co-existence today. The research project builds on the interdisciplinary outlook of the Modernist avant-garde and includes somatic-informed practices of re-embodiment, dialogic and relational compositional experiments, video documentation, and choreo-cinematic strategies. The workshop will undertake performative “ghosting” experiments in public spaces in Vienna relevant to Holger's biography and practice, to re-activate artistic traces and resonances.
By engaging deeply with Holger’s diasporic modernism, the project bridges past, present, and future practices of embodied resistance and renewal. It invites participants into a process of ethical world-making through dance – a shared inquiry into how movement can cultivate attention, empathy, and different ways of being together.
The aim of this research project is to re-activate and re-somatise Holger’s pedagogy and artistic legacy – nearly lost in the Austrian modern dance canon – through contemporary somatic intelligence, improvisational research, and work with objects. Participants explore themes of exile, resilience, empowerment, and legacy through embodied and choreographic inquiry. They engage collaboratively with inclusive and ethical dance practices, treating movement as both artistic expression and social practice. Historical lineage and contemporary identity are connected, asking participants to map their own creative genealogies and cultural grounding. The goal is to develop new ways of world-making (Weltbilder) through collective, site-responsive, and screen-based choreographic explorations.
Based on Holger's pedagogy touch is used in consentful and somatically informed ways as tool for creative practice – touch between bodies, and touch through bodies and objects.