Culture in rural areas
Opening doors for young people – how explore dance combats the silence with dance
With physical precision and emotional strength, the pop-up WUW – Wind und Wand by dancer duo ZINADA speaks of pressure and marginalisation in youth, but also of self-empowerment. With this performance, the explore dance network brings contemporary dance to places where art rarely goes – and meets young people for whom silence is sometimes louder than all else.
By David Schmidt | 27 June 2025
A grey gym, strong electro beats, a few dozen pupils on benches – and a wall in the middle of the room. Not a real one, but a gym mat smeared with writing and colourful graffiti motifs. It symbolises the challenges that young people face.
In their coming-of-age performance WUW – Wind und Wand, Jin Lee and Jihun Choi tell the story – merely through dance and without words – of the struggles that young people go through with themselves, their parents’ expectations, feelings of shame, depression and the pressure to perform.
The wall controlled by Jin Lee’s dance partner Jihun Choi is a mighty obstacle that the artist tries to overcome, over and over again – in vain. After countless attempts, she collapses on the floor, visibly resigned. But then Lee takes up the dance again, this time with a new dynamic, playful and lighter. What seemed immutable just a moment ago is gradually transformed – until Lee finally stands tall and confident on the wall. Conflicts can be resolved, hurdles can be overcome: WUW ends on a note that offers encouragement to their young audience at the Strausberg II grammar school in Altlandsberg. ZINADA danced here in May 2025.
The performance was initiated by the explore dance network for dance for young audiences, which brings children and young people into direct contact with contemporary dance and aims to further enable more artistic participation by young audiences throughout Germany.
A central component are the so-called pop-up pieces, which also include WUW: these are mobile productions that do not require complex stage equipment and take place where young audiences already are – in classrooms, gyms and assembly halls. A small town like Altlandsberg is a particularly good place to perform in. “We want to take dance to places where it doesn’t normally occur,” says Johanna Simon, project manager at explore dance.
“It’s like a sneeze – you can’t suppress it”
Modern dance can be emotionally challenging. This is clearly evident in the reactions of the young audience. The fact that ZINADA’s performance gets by entirely without words is a particular strength: it creates a directness that provides young people with immediate access to the topic.
For some this causes visible irritation: A boy is sitting on the sidelines with a bright red face.He avoids looking at the stage, laughs embarrassed and uncontrollably. “It’s like a sneeze,” says teacher Anne Schnetzinger sympathetically about the laughing student, “You can’t suppress it.” It is important to support the students during such emotional outbursts.
It is thanks to Schnetzinger that the students at the new Strausberg II secondary school are able to see such performances at all. She has been teaching art in Altlandsberg in the Märkisches Oderland, an hour away from Berlin, since 2018. To her it is important to not only teach art history to the children and young people living here, but also to introduce them to contemporary art.
The search for words that express individual feelings
After the performance, the teenagers talk about what they have experienced, their feelings and their interpretations in a workshop. They form a large circle around Jin Lee and together search for words to express their individual feelings. Pens and yellow sticky notes are distributed. They write down two words: A feeling they had while watching and the part of their body where they feel it. One pupil writes “happiness and head” and sticks the note on her forehead. Another writes “despair and head”– and then sticks the note to her heart.
“That’s exactly why I do my job”, says Schnetzinger: “To open doors for young people.” The teacher wants to offer access not only to art such as modern dance, but also to other forms of thinking, feeling and talking about it. “Especially here in the countryside, physicality is often only associated with achievement,” she says. “But what happens when we start using our bodies to talk about things that can’t be put into words?”
Children at Brandenburg’s schools are often good at sports and at functioning. But when it comes to their feelings, they become quiet. And this is precisely what makes the work of explore dance and performances like the one by ZINADA so valuable: “It’s about things that children can’t deal with because nobody talks to them about how it works. But the reactions show: the feelings are there.”
“In the countryside, interactions are often less open – there is a lack of encounters with people who are different.”
Jin Lee from ZINADA emphasises how important it is to address emotions in teenagers by telling a story: After a performance in front of a sixth grade class in Potsdam, a girl approached her and asked: “Did you really experience it like that?”
The twelve-year-old said that she suffered from depression and could not talk to her parents about it. “She felt like they were treating her as if she were a threat,” says Lee. “She was twelve and felt severely depressed, and there was no one to help her. That made me incredibly sad.” She encouraged the girl: “I said to her: “You will find your way, just like I found mine. Yours will be different to mine, but I know you will find it!”
Such encounters with adults who listen, says Lee, were rare in her childhood – and are still not very common today. “I learnt as a child that my way of being was wrong,” she says. “I was always too much. Too loud, too wild. And I was constantly told what a girl should be like.”
Even today, she still encounters prejudices in her work – especially when she is travelling in more rural regions, as she is here with explore dance. People are often less open, sometimes you sense subtle rejection, sometimes open irritation. In big cities like Berlin, Munich, Hamburg or Potsdam, on the other hand, the response is much more open and diverse. “I encounter sexism and racism more often in the countryside,” she says. “I’ve realised that the two go hand in hand, even with children.”
However, she actually welcomes these incidents because: “It’s good when it becomes visible. Then it can be discussed.” Jin Lee speaks to students who behave like this on the spot. She will discuss it later in front of the class, she says, “but without naming names”. Away from the big cities, there is often a lack of engagement with diversity – or simply encounters with people who are different. “That’s precisely why we want to also be present there.”
David Schmidt is independent journalist and lives in Berlin. www.davidhansmoritzschmidt.de
In the seven years of its existence, explore dance has so far produced 35 dance pieces for children and young people of various ages, including pieces for the stage and mobile pop-up pieces. These have been shown in over 600 performances on stages, in classrooms and in public spaces in cities and rural areas throughout Germany – from Altlandsberg to Lalling, from Bergen (on Rügen) to Eisenhüttenstadt, from Osnabrück to Braunschweig to Berlin.
