ELISABETH SCHILLING

“Contemporary dance is still quite a young art form”

The winner of last year’s Lëtzebuerger Danzpräis, choreographer and dancer Elisabeth Schilling has a packed programme lined up for 2022.

At the beginning of March you launched the Box Of Life, a collaborative project that will see you create a choreography based on messages of joy and hope the public has written on postcards. What do you hope to get out of this? I think my personal goal is really to bring people closer to each other. But I also hope to inspire them to make art or dance part of their everyday life, to have that consciousness. I love to connect with people, with my audience. Working with students from the Lycée des Arts et Métiers, I was really excited to have so many young artists involved in this project… I can only say that it’s been a very fruitful collaboration.

But creating this involvement with people is also part of your residency at the Trifolion in Echternach and your Dancing The City project… When [Trifolion artistic director] Maxime Bender invited me, I was quite thrilled to really think about ways of how we can make people in Echternach passionate about dance. I mean, contemporary dance is still quite a young art form. Also, because it doesn’t communicate in linear ways, it can create a bit of anxiety… There’s a big debate about how we make art accessible, so having the opportunity to work there for three years hopefully gives me that chance to do that.

But there seems to have been an explosion in contemporary dance in Luxembourg over the last 10 years or so. To what do you attribute this growing interest? I think the theatre directors are very supportive. This younger generation working here in Luxembourg, we’ve had so much support from the [contemporary dance centre] 3CL, who really have accompanied us step by step. But the directors of the cultural institutions are picking up on that. So they’re giving us those opportunities, expressing interest, and we’re working very collaboratively with them.

But isn’t dance also crossing over into other art forms? That is also something that is very inspiring to me because you’re stepping out of your comfort zone.

I have done lots of projects with visual artists or designers, which made me think about what spaces we dance in--maybe museum space or white cube galleries that have a completely different context. And then music, of course, is, I think, the biggest inspiration on my work.

You founded your own company in 2016. Has that proven to be liberating, or does the responsibility add pressure?

At the time I didn’t think so much about it because it was more like a legal thing. But we signed a convention with the ministry of culture so we have a small team that I can employ via the [non-profit] structure on an hourly basis, which is incredibly important and necessary. I think it was an incredible move from the politicians to realise that artists should be valued because other countries don’t have that kind of support.

Last year in November, you won the Lëtzebuerger Danzpräis. How much does it help having that sort of title for your career?

It was just a beautiful feeling to get that recognition for all the work that I’ve been doing. Well, first of all, I got €10k, so I put that right back into the company.

So, what I did with that was to increase everyone’s wages, because I thought they were not being paid enough. Because I got the prize also due to them, so I want to support them as well.

Elisabeth Schilling studied dance in Frankfurt and London and currently is artist-in-residence at Trifolion Echternach.