As a child, Lutz Förster had a hobby that was unusual for his age: he loved ballroom dancing and at the age of twelve he appeared in public as a little gentleman.

Like Pina Bausch, whom he greatly admired, he came from Solingen, where he was born on January 2, 1953 and grew into the lanky, tall, long-legged dancer with light blonde hair and blue eyes whose striking appearance later helped shape so many of Pina Bausch's pieces.

Although his parents allowed ballroom dancing, the boy did not take ballet lessons.

After graduating from high school, he didn't immediately study dance, but rather history, Romance languages ​​and Slavic studies.

He only took his first ballet lessons as a student.

He must have liked it very much because he soon left the University of Hamburg to apply to the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen.

Modern dance and dance theater were trained there and it was known for giving older students with little previous education a chance.

Förster's talent for movement, posture and musicality was promoted by ballroom dancing as a child, and as was already evident during the training, every movement of his looks simply impressive.

Pina Bausch also recognized this and, after just one year of study, employed Förster in her “Sacre du Printemps” because there were no male dancers in her Wuppertal ensemble.

A latecomer as an avant-gardist

In 1978, after completing his dance training, Förster went there.

From the start he liked Bausch's unusual rehearsal processes, where dancers could think up a lot and suggest a lot.

Five to ten percent of the little anecdotes or scenes that were played or danced, often developed as answers to questions from the choreographer, made it into the provisional final version of the piece for the premiere.

Even if Förster moved away from time to time to prove himself elsewhere, for example with the José Limon Dance Company in New York, he always came back.

It could also have been due to his own late start in training that he became a good professor of contemporary dance, because those who start late have to think more about the how of a movement than someone who has been imitating it at the age of five.

In his classes you could feel that he loved teaching not only because he was good at it, but also because he was rigorous, ironic, precise and direct.

His ethos, shared with Pina Bausch, is: Honest, more correct, more beautiful is always possible.

However, Förster is no stranger to vanity: a ballet hall or even a stairwell can be stages for him.

Until 2019 he taught in Essen for three decades and headed the institute during two of them, collaborating with Pina Bausch for 34 years.

From 2013 to 2015 he headed the Wuppertal Dance Theater, which was orphaned after Bausch's death in 2009.

Today the 2015 winner of the Léonide Massine Dance Prize for his life's work turns seventy.