Barbara Kaufmann

began her dance training at the Iwanson International School of Modern Dance in her hometown of Munich in 1977 and subsequently travelled to Stockholm, Paris and New York to study dance. Her first professional engagement as a dancer was with the Iwanson Dance Company, where she performed in Laser in Concert and The Police by Eberhard Schöner.

She also danced with Tanzprojekt München under the direction of Birgitta Trommler. In 1984, Susanne Linke invited her to join the Folkwang Dance Studio at the Folkwang University of the Arts. It was there that she first came into contact with the choreographic style of Pina Bausch (through Prof Hans Züllig and Jean Cebron). She made her first guest appearance with the Tanztheater Wuppertal in The Rite of Spring in 1985. Barbara Kaufmann joined the ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in 1987, dancing in numerous repertoire pieces and new creations. In addition to her work as a dancer, from 2001 she worked alongside Pina Bausch to assist with rehearsals and was involved in restagings of various repertoire pieces. She also began working on the company’s archives.

From 2009 she took over as the Tanztheater’s rehearsal director and assisted the guest choreographers Dimitris Papaioannou and Richard Siegal with their new creations. From 2010 to 2016, her work expanded to include collaborations with the Pina Bausch Foundation in the fields of documentation, video annotation and oral history. Since 2017 she has been involved with the Pina Bausch Foundation to lead restagings of The Rite of Spring by the English National Ballet, the École des Sables and the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, as well as a restaging of Iphigenia in Tauris by the Semperoper Ballet Dresden.

In 2024 she will be leading rehearsals of the Tannhäuser Bacchanal, which she has already restaged twice, in 2004 and 2013. She has appeared in films by Amos Gitai, Pedro Almodovar and Wim Wenders and has performed in dance films and video works by Lee Yanor, Anne-Louise Frei and Samantha Shay.

She is also involved in educational projects with schoolchildren and dance students.