The 52-year-old dramaturge Adolphe Binder, who left the Wuppertal Tanztheater with a severance payment from 2017 to 2018, will be in charge of the dance department at the Basel Theater for just two seasons.

Benedikt von Peter, director of the house since 2020, has a five-year contract until 2025, and so Binder's contract, which begins in 2023, will also expire in 2025, which is why a new director would not have to take over, but could freely decide on the future of the dance division.

The interim solution came about because dance director Richard Wherlock was not given notice in good time.

When he stops in 2023, he will be 65 years old and has dominated dance in Basel for 22 years.

Both the decisions to leave a choreographer as head of department for such a long time and to hire dramaturges as directors for a short period of time do not do justice to dance as an art form.

Not only do both models put the dancers at a disadvantage.

Some don't have enough opportunity to work with other directors, others watch as the guest choreographers pass the door handle to each other.

Some are at the mercy of the style and working methods, the taste decisions and personal preferences of an artist boss for an indefinitely long time, others have no time to grow together as an ensemble, to familiarize themselves more deeply with a style or even to get to know the repertoire of other epochs.

Now you can say: dancers can walk.

But the audience can't.

She lives in Basel, and there's only one three-sector house there.

Ever since the discrediting of ballet as a language of movement dating back three hundred years has been taken for granted in European dance theater so that it obscures the fact that neoclassical or post-neoclassical choreographers, such as John Neumeier, William Forsythe or Christian Spuck, have long been creating dance theater pieces dance in the theaters has developed into an art that has largely been forgotten about history.

It's time to rethink

Consequently, contemporary dance is hardly interested in its own history of the twentieth century.

But without the study of aesthetic traditions, all art loses value.

A lack of history levels the verdicts, and where the names Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown or Maguy Marin should be, one reads Nacho Duato, Mauro Bigonzetti, David Dawson or Crystal Pite.

That would be as if orchestras were doing a program like “Classic Radio”.

Dance ensembles are more comparable to orchestras than drama ensembles.

It's about technique, about unison, about interpretation and knowledge, not about profiling leaders.

There is another reason why it is time to rethink: Whenever dancers have recently complained about bullying, body shaming, overwork or exceeding private and professional boundaries, it happened in too tight working relationships with leaders who lack what the dancer's everyday life from morning to night determined at night: the mirror, being reflected.