The artistic team of backsteinhaus produktion, which organises the work at the interface between performance and dance as well as artistic and discursive practice, consists of the artistic director Nicki Liszta, the project manager and performer Isabelle Gatterburg and the composer and musician Heiko Giering. Also part of the core team are managing director Franziska Stulle, Paulina Mandl for dramaturgy, production and mediation, Emma Sulz for public relations, as well as different collaborators for audio description development and realisation. The artistic team for each project is complemented by different artists, such as choreographer Natascha Moschini, director and musician Siri Thiermann, video artist Adrian Schmidt, costume designer Rebecca Moltenbrey, set designer Moritz Martin and performers Steven Chotard and Andreia Rodrigues, who accompany the team in changing constellations.
backsteinhaus produktion is a Stuttgart-based company that has been working interdisciplinary and based on contemporary dance since 2008. backsteinhaus cooperated with the Theater Rampe (Stuttgart) from 2016 – 2023, resulting in new collaborations and connections to national and international partners such as Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Theater Lübeck, EinTanzHaus Mannheim, LICHTHOF Theater Hamburg, SID in Seoul (South Korea), Schauspielhaus Wien or HochX Theater and Live Art (Munich). The company maintains a rehearsal stage in the premises of the Kunstverein Wagenhallen e.V. and has its headquarters in the Schickareal in Stuttgart Feuerbach. The cooperation with the Theater Rampe will be realigned in the 2023/24 season under the new management.
In terms of content, the artistic work deals with current socio-political and social discourses and negotiates topics from a Eurocentric-critical and queer-feminist perspective. The team is interested in dance as a de-stylised, constantly redefining language. Nicki Liszta’s choreographies often utilise physical extremes full of staged force and their effects. Aesthetically, she plays with the creation of grotesque images and the shifting of supposed taboo zones. In her works, Nicki Liszta is always looking for new ways to take contemporary dance out of its elitist and abstract niche. With each production by backsteinhaus produktion, a new moving cosmos is created that gives rise to immersive performances, mediation formats, workshops and discussion rounds in black boxes as well as in spaces far removed from the theatre.
As a sociocratically organised team, backsteinhaus produktion is primarily concerned with the topic of “theatre communities in solidarity” and breaking down barriers in addition to its artistic work. Inspired by the quote “nothing about us without us” (slogan attributed to Michael Masutha and William Rowland from Disabled People South Africa), the company is increasingly endeavouring to make its productions accessible on various levels. To this end, they are already working with various people from urban society to develop participatory formats.
Through the inclusion of diverse perspectives, we hope to transform the participation of the ‘majority’ into the participation of the ‘diversity’ in our society in the long term. In doing so, we follow queer-feminist, anti-discriminatory, anti-racist and anti-ableist principles. We are convinced that artistic work in and with urban society should be made visible and invite participation in order to create polyphonic discourses.
