A white sheet of paper – that’s all it took to gently set the dance group in motion. The paper demands all attentiveness when balancing on the back of the hand, when walking forward and backward, when sitting down, when rolling on the floor, when raising and lowering the arms. Later the sheet becomes the connecting piece between the young dancers – together they have to engage in a rhythm, a free movement in space.

This playful confrontation with their own bodies, with fantasy and feelings also elicits aspects of their nature from the pupils of the Landesschule für Blinde und Sehbehinderte that even the accompanying teachers did not know until now, as director Michael Theiss revealed. This alone is a great benefit and a great success of this five-day workshop, which was organized by the Taupunkt e.V. in September 2018.

Cultural education is a focal point of the city’s new cultural strategy – and this workshop is a fine example of the role of the independent scene in this process. Initiated by Heda Bayer from Chemnitzer Taupunkt e.V., the team of the Czech dance pedagogue Katerina Eva Lanci involved the children and young people in a perceptibly fascinating experience in which the visual impairment or blindness took a back seat, because the involvement with the music, the group, the situation became the occasion for exuberance and a wealth of movement. At the same time, the Chemnitz organizers used the workshop and the exchange with the Czech artists as practical further training for their own work.