Katja Heitmann is a young choreographer (Germany, 1987), graduated in 2012 with a BA Choreography at the Fontys Dance Academy in Tilburg, the Netherlands. Currently she is living and working in the Netherlands and researching her style and signature with a development grant from the Province Noord-Brabant.
Katja has a unique talent to involve her audience in a humoristic, surprising and sometimes uncanny way. Organically she crosses borders of circus, fine-arts, mime, dance and theatre. She is constantly looking for unconventional and conceptual ways of presenting her performances and reaching out to the audience.
In summer 2013 Katja created the festivalperformance kraud-fun-ding as a reaction on the difficulties for a young choreographer to start working and creating. She performed this show for 48 days, reaching over 9000 visitors. September 2013 she presented ‘Eggs are good for your hair’ at Dansateliers Rotterdam, a unconventional performance with slack rope-artist Melanie Hagedorn, that was characterized as a ‘twisted- Disney’ conceptual circus-dance performance. This was the starting-point of her research ‘This is not a show’, a theatrical triple bill about our every days freak show, self-created boundaries and masquerades, which she presented in spring 2014 at Festival Cement in Den Bosch (NL).
In spring 2014 she also created ‘Me, my Selfie and I, a solo for two dancers and an Ipad’ for the Dutch Dance Festival and Fashionclash. For this performance she collaborated with VanHarten-fashiondesigh and two young students of the High school pre-education for Dance Maastricht.
Both ‘Eggs are good for your hair’ and ‘Me, my selfie and I’ are well received and were booked at (amongst other places) Opera Estate Festival in Veneto and the Dutch Moving Futures Festival.
She is now supported by DansBrabant, Festival Cement, Theaterfestival Boulevard and the Province Noord-Brabant.