Balroom Bliss Soweto
We have been working towards this project for more than two years. At a time when sustainability, community and participation are widely discussed, yet cultural and funding policies are constantly shifting and increasingly make sustainable ways of working difficult, our transcontinental collaboration as a collective faced numerous challenges – and none of our funding applications were successful. This makes it all the more meaningful that, through joint efforts and with the support of the export funding programme of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, we were ultimately able to realise Ballroom Bliss as a performance and community project in Soweto.
Together with Moeketsi Koena, Gaby Saranouffi, Thabiso Pule, Welcome Mlindzeleni Maphalala, Caroline Hlatshwayo, Lena Berger, our children Simon and Moritz, the wonderful team of I’Trotra ART X Connection NPC, and many helping hands from the Soweto community, something truly special came into being. We would also like to extend our sincere thanks to the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, which hosted a workshop as part of the project.
Ballroom Bliss became an extraordinary, emotional and high-energy event – one in which we ourselves were guests, supported and carried by the local community in Soweto.
Out of this shared work, the film RONA emerged. RONA is a collective film by deufert&plischke, created in close collaboration with Moeketsi Koena, Gaby Saranouffi and Thabiso Heccius Pule. Structured around the artist portraits of Gaby Saranouffi and Moeketsi Koena, the film moves between everyday life in Yeoville (Johannesburg) and the ballroom in Soweto.
At its core are collaboration, shared experience and voices that are often overlooked – particularly those of women, children and families, set against the backdrop of increasing gender-based violence.
The film was produced by deufert&plischke and I’Trotra ART X Connection NPC,
co-produced with the Pina Bausch Zentrum, and realised with the support of the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg.
Premiere:
RONA will celebrate its first public screening on 7 March at the Bapedi Hall.
The film will not be available online and will be shown exclusively at festivals.
Since 2001, deufert&plischke have understood themselves as an artists’ collective, working in shifting constellations and creating works in dance, theater, film, photography, and music.
Their projects emerge from the intersections of these disciplines and, above all, from the spaces between social interactions. their artistic practice is rooted in encounters, relationships, and collective experiences.
In recent years, the collective has included Kattrin, Thomas, Moritz and Simon Deufert, Lena Berger, Karen Zimmermann, Nilüfer Kemper, Philipp Czychon and Lea Gerschwitz. Based at spinnereischwelm, their studio in North Rhine-Westphalia, the collective develops projects that unfold through long-term artistic research, sustained collaborations, and international exchange.
Rather than working through short-term interventions, the collective builds enduring working relationships and partnerships with artists, cultural institutions, and local contexts. Long-term collaborations connect their practice to Kuopio and Oulu in Finland and to Los Angeles in the United States, while an emerging partnership is currently being developed in Johannesburg, South Africa. These connections form continuous lines of dialogue and shared production across different social and geographic settings.
Social sustainability is central to the collective’s artistic approach. Their work is fundamentally collaborative, emerging through collective and participatory processes that actively involve diverse communities. By working closely with local partners and participants, their projects grow from specific social contexts and remain connected to the people and places that shape them.
From spinnereischwelm as a point of departure, the collective’s projects have been realized in cities including Los Angeles, New York, Tel Aviv, Alexandria, Athens, Moscow, Vienna, Graz, Istanbul, Oulu, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, Bergen, Stamsund, Copenhagen, Singapore, Kuopio, Warsaw, Poznań, Prague, Žilina, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Barcelona, and Madrid.
Actual Work
Fountains
since 2024
This durational happening is created again and again at each station it travels to. Its evolving theme is the fluidity of bodies, their movements, their leaking, their pouring. Fountains is part performance, part concert, part botanical garden and part masked dance. The audience is invited to make their own masks, wear them to join the dances and blend in with the other performers.
Familienangelegenheiten
since 2023
Based on the idea that the family is the smallest political cell in which decisions about how to live together, how to make decisions together and how to respond to an ever-changing world can be negotiated on a daily basis, deufert&plischke together with artist friends, start a quest to collect stories from as many families as possible, to dance together and to share ideas and memories about what a family is.
Stoffwechsel
since 2023
In this participatory performance and happening, clothes take the lead. Finnish curator and performer Johanna Tuukkanen moves through a landscape of clothes, sounds and words, created in collaboration with deufert&plischke, and invites the audience to join her in transforming the landscape, pointing out the completely underestimated role of clothing in one's own life.
A Worn World
since 2020
«A Worn World» travels the world as an open fashion studio, social space and intergenerational community ballroom project where designers and performers work with audiences, collecting stories and relationships people have with clothes and, through clothes, with their identities and the world.
Just in Time
since 2016
«Just in Time» is a community-based project that began with the aim of gathering as many voices as possible from around the world to tell the story of people's relationship with dance. Letters to Dance are written and performed in workshops and ballrooms, sharing favourite moves or telling stories about people's journey in dance. Since 2016, more than 2000 letters have been collected in more than 20 cities... and there is no end in sight.
Inventing (overlooked) Artists
since 2004
In a collective effort of fabulation, a group of artists, art lovers or even an entire village invents an artist who would be overlooked locally because of their gender, origin or ability. This cross-disciplinary project takes on the impossible task of trying to fill the gaps created by power relations in the art world.
Ballroom Bliss
since 2025
With Ballroom Bliss, deufert&plischke continue their unique artistic practice in which dance is not only an expression but also a creation of community. For over two decades, they have understood choreography as a social art form – as a space in which society is not only represented, but jointly created. Their latest production is dedicated to the transformative power of dancing together and opens up a realm of experience in which collective movement gives rise to new forms of togetherness.
spinnereischwelm
The spinnereischwelm is a registered non-profit association dedicated to promoting contemporary art in rural areas. Located in the heart of Schwelm, the association creates an open space of possibilities for artistic practice, exchange, and social discourse. At the core of its work lie issues of great social relevance: horizontal forms of collaboration in rural contexts, the lived realities of women in the countryside, precarious living and working conditions, as well as questions of the body, sexual, and gender identity. spinnereischwelm e.V. often develops its projects together with the residents of Schwelm—through a participatory process that incorporates the perspectives and experiences of the local community. Among its most recent projects is Fountains, an artistic exploration of bodily boundaries and the taboo of bodily fluids, which—at Schwelm’s former outdoor swimming pool, the Schwelmebad—addressed questions of intimacy, shame, and social norms.
