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Carolin Jüngst
Choreographer, Performer
Carolin Jüngst (she/her & they/them) works as a choreographer and performer between Munich and Hamburg. Together with Lisa Rykena, she creates work as part of the duo Rykena/Jüngst, in co-production with Kampnagel in Hamburg and HochX in Munich. Their work has also been presented at various venues and festivals, including brut Wien/imagetanz Festival, Outnow Festival Bremen, and Hauptsache Frei Festival Hamburg. Their piece SHE LEGEND (2019/2020) was invited to Tanzplattform 2022, which took place at HAU/Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin in March 2022.
She trained in equestrian acrobatics for over ten years, studied theatre and dance studies as well as philosophy, completed a dance trainee programme at Leipziger Tanztheater, and graduated with an MA in Performance Studies in Hamburg in 2017. In 2019–2020, she was a scholarship holder of the Claussen-Simon Foundation.
In her dance productions, she ventures into strip clubs, 1920s variety theatres, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, queer comic conventions, and futuristic worlds, bringing mermaids, She-Hulks, expressive arias, velvet stages, and marble puffer jackets into dialogue with one another.
Her work explores queer-feminist, intersectional, and anti-ableist discourses surrounding the body, as well as the transformation of normative ways of categorising bodies. To this end, she draws on classical, mythological, and pop-cultural material to create new characters, hybrid forms, and grotesque embodiments, with the aim of dismantling stereotypical, clichéd, and heteronormative gender attributions. Choreographically, she often navigates the relationship between body and voice, exploring how they can comment on and question one another. She also works with a range of performative storytelling methods.
Her work consistently engages with the reinterpretation and reinvention of virtuosity, the imagination and manifestation of diverse bodies, and the affirmation of expressive, humorous, and amateur bodies.
She is also deeply engaged with audio description as an accessibility tool and its artistic potential, and works as an audio describer, primarily in the field of dance. Audio description is the verbal description of visual phenomena for blind and visually impaired people and is used in various contexts, including theatre, film, and television. By integrating audio description as an artistic tool into her performances, she transforms it into a performative device that questions the dominance of visual culture and the associated attributions imposed on bodies, expanding these through a performative practice of imagination.
Selected Productions
SHE LEGEND | Hamburg premiere on 4 December 2019 at Kampnagel; Munich premiere on 16 July 2020 at HochX.
Guest performances: 8 May 2021, Outnow Festival Bremen (online); 25 August 2021, Hauptsache Frei Festival Hamburg; 4–5 March 2022, brut Wien/imagetanz Festival; 16–18 March 2022, Tanzplattform at HAU Berlin.
Funded by the Cultural Department of the City of Munich, the Ministry of Culture and Media of Hamburg, the Fonds Darstellende Künste, and the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung. Guest performances were additionally supported by the DFDK Hamburg guest performance funding programme, among others.
Link: SHE LEGEND – HochX
ROSE LA ROSE | Hamburg online premiere on 25 February 2021 at Kampnagel; Munich premiere on 24 July 2021 at HochX.
Funded by the Cultural Department of the City of Munich, the Ministry of Culture and Media of Hamburg, the Fonds Darstellende Künste, and the Claussen-Simon Foundation.
Link: ROSE LA ROSE – HochX
ARIE/ELLE | Premiere on 22 June 2018 at K3/Kampnagel Hamburg as part of the emerging artists' residency programme Limited Edition.
Link: ARIE/ELLE – K3/Kampnagel
SPOKEN DANCE | Research project on audio description in dance by Carolin Jüngst, Ursina Tossi, and Lisa Rykena, funded by NPN Stepping Out. Website launch planned for spring 2022.
ON TRANSLATION | Research project on Easy Language, funded by the Fonds Darstellende Künste through its Take Care Residencies programme and by Kampnagel Hamburg.
