The idea of a trade fair exclusively for dance was developed in the early 1990s by Anne Neumann-Schultheiß, Managing Director of the Gesellschaft für Zeitgenössischen Tanz e.V. (Society for Dance Research). She presented her vision of lively connection between dance, politics, and business to the state authorities of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the city of Essen, then later to the state capital of Düsseldorf, and lobbied strongly for this idea at artistic and political levels. She achieved this with the congenial management team of Kajo Nelles from North Rhine-Westphalia and Carolelinda Dickey from the USA, former president of the board at APAP, the largest American booking conference in New York City. In the first fifteen years of the dance fair's existence, they managed to make it one of Germany's biggest dance events and the world's leading trade fair for contemporary dance alongside the Dance Platform, the Dance Congress, and the German Dance Award. No small feat!
Awkward political idea: Let's save Tanzmesse!
I have been attending internationale tanzmesse nrw in Düsseldorf for over twenty years. As an exhibitor with a stand at the fair, I have been able to attract international attention and numerous readers and customers for my dance magazine tanznetz. Between 2010 and 2023, as artistic director of the international festival DANCE for contemporary dance, I discovered choreographers such as Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor or the Tjimur Dance Company and invited them to Munich to give a guest performance. And above all, I was able to get to know journalist and curatorial colleagues here and use these international contacts for decades, refreshing them again and again. I hardly know anyone from the German dance scene who does not have internationale tanzmesse nrw firmly in their diary, whilst it is also invaluable for the international scene. Now it seems it is going to end for all of us…
When the founding generation left the Tanzmesse management team after twenty years, three directorates took over for a limited period of time with different, yet similar approaches of exchange, networking, cooperation, plus opening up to more companies from Australia, Africa, and South America.
Half of the state funding was successfully obtained from the Ministry of Culture and the other half from the Ministry of Economics. It was a novelty in Germany for the Ministry of Economics to subsidise a dance fair with considerable funds. After thirty years of successful international contemporary dance networking, Tanzmesse will not be funded by the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Culture for its next edition in 2025/2026. Were it to now come to an end, it would be catastrophic for the scene and an indictment of the state. Because with this fair, Düsseldorf brings the contemporary dance world together in its own backyard. Tanzmesse was and is a unique selling point for meaningful international cultural promotion. Does North Rhine-Westphalia really want to do without it? It is losing far more than a marketplace. Especially in these times of political division and war, we need a place where artists from all over the world come together with guests to understand, discuss, and change (not only cultural) perspectives.
Dear the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Culture, please consider saving this fair! The world's dance scene would be delighted and Germany would not – as is so often the case at the moment – look like a country in decline.