Mike Dele Dittrich Frydetzki, Minh Duc Pham & Irina Pauls

1990 - A spirit of optimism. Free spaces, to be filled seemingly without limits. The Leipzig choreographer Irina Pauls took advantage of this vacuum and created an artistic home for herself at the Leipzig Schauspielhaus theatre. With seven dancers, she wanted to realise her ideas of dance theatre there. New dance pieces were created. Research in Leipzig's southern lignite mining region fundamentally changed the way she worked from 1994 onwards. Open-cast mining turned over the earth there for decades and entire places disappeared. In the fifth part of her series "mehr als KOHLE" (more than COAL), Pauls talks about her personal relationship to the depleted landscape, her approach to the people of the region and uses this example to take the audience along on the path of her artistic reorientation in the 1990s.

Three decades later, Pauls is once again researching in Leipzig's southern region and focussing specifically on the changing relationships between people, now in the post-mining region. The change in the landscape surrounding the people due to the extraction of raw materials and the associated loss of self-evident spatial localisation are set in relation to forms of tradition and change within specific dance forms.

What has remained? Pauls focusses on the dance around the maypole, which once united the people of the villages. The maypole trunk was decorated with colourful ribbons in a dance-like manner. But what happens when there is no longer a maypole? What forms and movements can be used to revitalise communal dancing? What stories can be told about people's relationships to the deformed, charred landscape?

Together with dancer Victoria McConnell and composer Eric Busch, Pauls explores a contemporary approach to folk dance forms centred around the maypole. She is looking for forms of artistic translation from the contemporary dance context. Folk dance elements are a source and inspiration to (re)initiate dancing communities.