PROGRAMME
Each year, the five-week educational scholarship programme allows dancers and young choreographers from around 40 countries to take part in around 250 workshops and research projects, and to watch all productions of the ImPulsTanz programme. Founded in 1996, the danceWEB International Scholarship Programme has ever since been an example of an internationally co-financed programme. From its beginning it would not have been possible without the individual support of the participants by funding partners in their respective countries. The festival’s international orientation provides an ideal platform for up-and-coming artists as well as interpreters and enables the sharing of ideas with teachers and choreographers to establish a network. In addition, the participants are mentored by internationally renowned artists from the dance and performance scene.
In 2026, choreographer, director, dancer and artistic director of the feath3r theory (TF3T), New York, Raja Feather Kelly will once again be danceWEB mentor.
“The ImPulsTanz utopia is a pressure cooker and a playground: you move, watch, make, party, repeat. It’s everything everywhere all at once. Every year I arrive with questions – How do you survive this much stimulation? Why are you here? What are you hunting for? How do you turn those questions into work that asks more of the world than it takes? Or just ride? I have been asking those questions since my first visit as a danceWEB scholar in 2009. I prepare for them seriously, and I never fully answer them – which, honestly, is the festival’s gift.
I’m honoured to return to ImPulsTanz in 2026 as the danceWEB mentor. My modus operandi for the scholars is simple and stubborn: Question Deeply. Require No Return. Accept All Residuals. That’s not a checklist so much as a practice. Ask the messy, uncomfortable questions. Give generously without expecting tidy reciprocity. Sit with the leftovers – the failed experiments, the small collapses, the gifts you didn’t plan for – and see what they reveal.
My work sits at the intersection of choreography, devised practice, queer aesthetics, and the politics of spectatorship. I read bodies as scores and surveillance as choreography: how we are tracked, mirrored, doubled, loved, mocked, and remade. Recently I’ve been thinking harder about the ways our digital doubles change rehearsal rooms and stages – how bodies become data, how attention is rationed, how care looks in an age of algorithms. These ideas shape the practical tools I bring: protocols for attentional hygiene (how to enter a festival without becoming exhausted), rituals for decompression and reflection, and low-tech ‘score-to-action’ templates that help a late-night impulse actually become a project in the world.
With danceWEB scholars I teach methods as much as aesthetics. We invent, we fail, we document. We translate wild questions into repeatable practices: micro-residencies that end with concrete next steps; collaborative documentation that honours process over product; consent-forward performance scores that centre safety and risk together. I push for modes of generosity – radical feedback that helps rather than wounds, exit rituals that let you leave a room intact, and archival habits that turn ephemeral experiments into legible trajectories.
This is also about politics: who gets seen, who gets mirrored, who gets the mic. We interrogate camp and glamour as strategies of refusal; we test sci-fi and doubleness as ways to imagine new embodiments; we treat ‘spectatorship’ not as passive consumption but as a muscle to be exercised. I want scholars to leave ImPulsTanz full of invention and also with tools for sustaining their practice – not burn-out, but appetite; not answers, but better questions; not spectacle, but practice.
In short: I am here to help artists move from curiosity to craft, from provocation to protocol. We will generate wild propositions and then ask: how do we make this legible, safe, and shareable? How do we turn a feverish five weeks into a lifetime of practice? I am dedicated to radical questioning, to infinite propositions, and to service – to making space where complexity and contradiction become the fuel for new work.
Question deeply. Take nothing for granted. Leave with more hunger than you arrived with.”
Applications for the 2026 programme are already closed.
The application deadline was 5 December 2025, 12:00 PM (CET)
The applicants will be informed about an acceptance or rejection by mid-February 2026. To confirm your participation in the danceWEB programme, the co-financing of 2.500 euro has to be guaranteed by a funding body or through sponsorship generated by the danceWEB participant by 15 June 2026. Participants must be of legal age.
After receiving the written confirmation of participation by the applicant, we will send you an official invitation letter to the programme. This letter is intended to support applications for travel subsidies, grants or other types of financial support. The danceWEB coordinator will be happy to advise you on possible funding opportunities, if this appears helpful.
With the applicant’s written confirmation of participation we reserve your place in the programme; this is binding and obliges you to pay the co-financing contribution. The final confirmation of the participation will be given upon receipt of the co-financing confirmation.
Cancellation Policy
Please note that you can cancel your participation until 17 June 2026. In this case, a cancellation fee of 50 euro will be retained (or requested) and we will refund the remaining amount that has already been paid (if applicable). For cancellations after 17 June 2026 there will be no more reimbursement, but 2,450 euro (2,500 euro minus cancellation fee) can be redeemed within ImPulsTanz workshop and research programme 2026, 2027 or 2028. A participation in danceWEB is only possible if the co-financing contribution is paid prior to the start of the programme.
Further information
https://www.lifelongburning.eu/capacity-grid/danceweb-scholarship
Contact
scholarship@danceweb.eu
The scholarship programme is an activity of the danceWEB association and a project of Life Long Burning – Futures Lost and Found, funded by the EU programme Creative Europe.