Simple Things

A tribute? A celebration? It’s more than that. Simple Things is first and foremost an act of sharing and a dialogue through gesture with a loved one. Ornella Balestra, Emmanuel Eggermont, Luca Giacomo Schulte and Takashi Ueno all danced for choreographer Raimund Hoghe, the unforgettable dramaturge of Pina Bausch's works. Together, they have ques­tioned their own physical memory to find a movement, an inspiration, a memory of the man who forever changed the way we look at the beauty of the body by exposing his own “non-traditional” physique. The challenge here is not to reprise extracts from his reper­toire, but rather to connect it with the pre­sent, according to the method professed by Hoghe himself. Performed by three of its cre­ators, this sensitive offering is chore­ographed by Emmanuel Eggermont and Luca Giacomo Schulte. Far from cultivating melan­choly, it reactivates the creative process of a work whose themes – love, life, death – remain essential.

Raimung Hoghe 

Born in Wuppertal, Hogue started out as a cultural journalist before becoming Pina Bausch's resident stage director for ten years. From 1989 onwards, he created his own pieces, composing the trilogy Meinwärts, Chambre séparée and Another Dream between 1994 and 2000. In France, he made a name for himself in 2002 with Young People, Old Voices, presented at the Montpellier Danse Festival, and in 2006 he received the Critics' Prize for Best Foreign Performance for his Swan Lake, 4 Acts. He died in 2021 at the age of 72.

Emmanuel Eggermont

After graduating from the CNDC in Angers in 2000, Eggermont danced in Raimund Hoghe'scompany for fifteen years. This left a profound impression in Eggermont, who then founded his company L'Anthracite, in which he combines his research into abstraction in dance with his taste for architecture and visual arts. He has initiated a cycle of “chromato-choreographic” studies in 2017, whose latest opus, “All Over Nymphéas”, was presented in 2022 at the Festival In d'Avignon. From 2019 to 2023, Eggermont was associate artist at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Tours.

Luca Giacomo Schulte

Born in Düsseldorf, Schulte is a theater designer and visual artist who has worked with Raimund Hoghe, and performed in numerous solo performances in various art centers. He has created pieces such as Rosenzeit – Ein solo für Ornella Balestra (2009), Joseph (2011), or For the Good Times at the Jardin de la Vierge du Lycée St-Joseph during the Festival d'Avignon 2023. He is one of the performers in An Evening with Raimund (2021), which features fragments of the German choreographer's work.

Ornella Balestra

Ornella Balestra studied at the Royal Academy of Dance in London, the Accademia Teatro alla Scala in Milan under the direction of Anna Maria Prina, at the Centre international de danse Rosella Higthtower in Cannes and at the Marika Besobrasova Dance Center in Monte Carlo. Selected by Maurice Béjart, she attended a three-year course at the International Mudra Center and danced as a soloist in his Le Ballet du XXe siècle. She returned to Italy and danced as a soloist with the most important Italian choreographers. She works as an artistic and dramaturgical consultant, leads workshops and is a dancer at the Venice Biennale and the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn. In 2024 she taught the European project Tra Fertili Terreni per l’Italia at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. Her first collaborative work with Raimund Hoghe was in 2003 with Tanzgeschichten, Ornella Balestra is an essential part of the artistic archive of Compagnie Raimund Hoghe and dances in An Evening with Raimund and the new productions Simple Things and Hidden Things. 

Takashi Ueno

Born in Japan in 1981, Takashi Ueno began modern dance with Misako Nanbu at the age of 15. While studying contemporary dance, Ueno discovered classical dance with Wayne Byers and African dance with Cora Dupuis. He has been working with Paco Decina since 2006. Ueno met Raimund Hoghe at a workshop in Yokohama in 2002, and met again in Paris in 2010. He has taken part in the creation of eight pieces, from Si je meurs, laissez le balcon ouvert (2010) to Hoghe’s last piece, Postcards from Vietnam (2019), dancing leading roles. He currently lives in Japan and has appeared in plays by Kimiho Hulbert and in the opera Carmen directed by Irina Brook.