Billinger & Schulz

Billinger & Schulz deal with society and publicity. For their artistic modelling and staging, they put the role of the body within our examples and topics into focus. They perceive the body’s movements to be a carrier and a vital sign with which to create images, effects and affective fields of tension.

Billinger & Schulz studied Applied Theatre Sciences, Dance, Choreography and Performance in Gießen, Frankfurt and Hildesheim. They were awarded the Sponsorship Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. They are recipients of support through the Promotion of Excellence in Dance Programme of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2015 until 2017. Recently, they were named new hopes in dance by “tanz” magazine.

”First they kissed, then they hit each other – and they did both completely devoid of any feeling. Tenderness without love, violence without hate. Düsseldorf-based choreographing couple Billinger & Schulz can confidently be regarded as contemporary experts for body action free of motivation and morality. (…) Nevertheless, on their stage, there is so much kissing, choking, beating and torturing going on, so much so that one reaches a certain level of exhaustion, that you quickly come to realize: Courtesy is the new provocation. (…) The old body-soul-duality, neglected within the dance genre traditionally, and necessarily so – it turns into a radical and comic concept here.

Billinger & Schulz just are profound lateral thinkers, recalcitrant in a silent way. They claim that the body, to them, is a “carrier and vital sign”. That makes you think of illness, yet it also signals they will not be done with the body’s burden of ciphers in quite some time.” (Nicole Strecker, tanz yearbook 2015)