NEWS

Trajal Harrell associate artist 2025 at Holland Festival
As an associate artist Trajal Harrell is creating a highly unique project titled Welcome to Asbestos Hall, which will be presented in June for the 78th edition of the Holland Festival.

+++

For the first time at the Park Avenue Armory, New York: Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow – September 9–20, 2025.

+++

Support the work of the Zürich Dance Ensemble now!

+++

Patronage Committee
The personalities on our patronage committee support Zürich Dance Ensemble with their precious knowledge and their relations.  

Daniel Baumann
Jacqueline Burckhardt
This Brunner
Bice Curiger
Hans Ulrich Obrist

HISTORY

For more than 20 years, dancer Trajal Harrell has been creating pieces for international dance and theater companies as well as museums and art institutions. He is now one of the most important choreographers in contemporary dance and has maintained long-term partnerships with first-class art institutions worldwide with his ensemble for many years.

From 2019 to July 2024, Trajal Harrell led his dance company at Schauspielhaus Zürich with great success. After the end of Nicolas Stemann and Benjamin von Blomberg’s directorship, Trajal Harrell decided to stay in Zurich and found the Zürich Dance Ensemble with administrative and artistic headquarters in the city of Zurich. This is the first time in Harrell’s international career that he and his company permanently united themselves to a city. 

The aim is to create a permanent and visible place for the company in connection with Zurich’s cultural institutions and festivals, to develop dance projects for the population of the city and the canton and, as the Zürich Dance Ensemble, to be internationally touring dance ambassadors for the city of Zurich. 

From the Whitney Museum in New York to the Singapore International Festival of Arts, from the Festival d’Automne in Paris to ImPulsTanz Vienna and the Venice Biennale, as well as in Berlin, Brussels, Rome, Geneva, Lausanne and Bern, the Zürich Dance Ensemble will regularly tour nationally and internationally.

Awards
Dancer of the Year 2018 (tanz magazine), The New York Times counts The Köln Concert among the Best Dance Performances 2023, Silver Lion Venice Biennale Dance 2024, etc.

Produced in Zurich
The Köln Concert, Deathbed, Monkey off My Back or the Cat’s Meow, Das Haus von Bernarda Alba, The Romeo, Tambourines

The American choreographer Trajal Harrell (*in Douglas, Georgia, USA) became internationally renowned for his series Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church and is now a regular guest at the most important international venues for dance and visual arts. The distinctive style of Harrell’s work emerges not only from the unusual combination of seemingly disparate dance languages such as voguing, postmodern dance, and butoh but also, and above all, from the fragility and humor that permeate all his pieces. Aesthetically, his works are always tributes to the performers on stage—he dresses them in carefully selected fabrics and draws significant inspiration from the developments in haute couture, which he sometimes directly incorporates into his performances. His specific movement style transforms his performers into extraordinary and autonomous beings. Harrell himself performs in most of his works. In recent years, his pieces have not only gained increasing recognition in the visual arts world but have also incorporated strong theatrical elements. For example, he engaged with Sophocles' Antigone, created a free adaptation of Shakespeare’s Juliet & Romeo, and reimagined Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for dance and our contemporary era in Maggie The Cat. From 2019 to 2024, Harrell was resident director at Schauspielhaus Zürich, where he led a dance company, the Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble. In Zürich, he directed The Köln Concert, Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow, Deathbed, The House of Bernarda Alba, The Romeo, and Tambourines. In 2023, Harrell was invited to create a work for the renowned Cour d'Honneur at the 77th edition of the Festival d'Avignon. The same year, the Festival d'Automne dedicated a retrospective to Harrell, presenting nine of his works in Paris.

Important works
Porca Miseria (Maggie The Cat, Deathbed, O Medea), Hoochie Koochie, Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (XS-XL), Antigone (XS-XL), Tickle the Sleeping Giant

Notable invitations
Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; Kunsthalle Bern; Aichi Triennial; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Zürich; Fondation Cartier, Paris; Sao Paulo Bienal; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Gwangju Biennale; Singapore International Festival of Arts; American Realness Festival; Berliner Festspiele; Barbican Arts Center, London; ImPulsTanz Festival, Vienna; Manchester International Festival; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kanal Pompidou, Brussels; Festival d’Automne, Paris; The Kitchen, New York; Barbican Centre, London; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Tanz im August, Berlin; Documenta - Parliament of Bodies, Kassel; MoMA, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum and Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou Metz; MoMA PS1, New York; Performa Biennial, New York; The New Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.

Awards
Dancer of the Year 2018 (Tanz magazine), The New York Times listed The Köln Concert among the Best Dance Performances of 2023, Silver Lion, Biennale Danza 2024.

We regularly collaborate with the following artists; they are part of the Zürich Dance Ensemble. More names will be added soon.

PRESSCLIPPINGS

The Köln Concert 

“Harrell’s signature runway movement, lush and stark, had a new maturity, resulting in a dance that possessed the clarity of a jewel.”
The New York Times

“The evening is meticulously crafted and danced with incredible precision. Yet, it leaves room for interpretations, associations, and subjective feelings.” 
Nachtkritik

“He mixes East Asian dance forms with Western modern dance, movements reminiscent of ancient vase paintings, but also Voguing — the runway style of the queer subculture in New York in the '80s.”
SRF Kultur 2

“The masterpiece of improvisational art becomes, in Harrell's sense, a masterclass of a mourning community. Joni Mitchell may provide the prelude, her voice pure and angelic. But later, with Jarrett, the choreography turns melancholic, earth-heavy, and heartbreakingly sentimental. It is an ode to the farewell of everything that was once an intact body — and a harmonious relationship between bodies.”
NZZ

“[Harrell] has made a career of working black boxes and proscenium stages alike for maximum effect… The theater is his House.”
Artforum

“[Harrell's] unique combination of Black queer movement and high modernist dance offers hope that some artists will not just make it through this moment of crisis, but come out stronger.”
frieze

The Romeo 

“The Romeo without Romeo? This thought is quickly forgotten once the dancing begins. The twelve dancers move so beautifully and dreamily, both tall and stocky, young and older.”
Tanznetz.de

“A grand dance theater that will intensify from performance to performance and continuously ignite new transformation processes. Strongly recommended, not only for dance fans.”
Kulturblogg

“The Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble is essentially the best calling card of the house. It embodies, effortlessly, the wide diversity that directors Benjamin von Blomberg and Nicolas Stemann aim for. The artists, led by house director Trajal Harrell, live boundary-crossing, live the coexistence of different cultures and arts, simply so — without any assertion or proclamation. That’s how theater should be.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Tambourines

“Another masterpiece of literature-inspired choreography.”
FAZ

“Harrell guides his ensemble through the fashion show as though he wants to crown the defilé from ‘The Romeo.’ He also draws lines from Butoh's philosophy to Western culture, much like Raimund Hoghe once did. What emerges is, above all, radiance.”
tanz

“Another reason to love Trajal Harrell!”
The Guardian

“Slut-shaming turns into slut-pride. It’s these movements of interpretation and reinterpretation, inclusion and exclusion, shifts and overlays of longing, faith, morality, and hypocrisy that are explored in Tambourines.”
NZZ

Monkey off My Back or the Cat’s Meow
 

“What a magnificent spectacle!”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“The fashion show can begin. The models take their strides, one foot precisely before the other and always bouncing, some with only their legs, others with their whole body, some in high heels, others barefoot in phantom heels.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“Trajal Harrell's grand dance evening at Schiffbau Zürich combines the pose and pathos of a divided society.”
nachtkritik.de

Deathbed

“‘Deathbed’ is a piece about dying, grieving, remembering, letting go — and is particularly touching in its rigorous abstraction.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“You are drawn into a dancer’s flow, into a performative flow, in which new steps, new movements, turns, new costumes, and new ritual acts are continuously executed and performed. I found it highly impressive. I’m always clear about what was going on, but it was beautiful.”
Deutschlandfunk 

“What sounds difficult — a dance piece meant to commemorate the African American choreographer Katherine Dunham, who passed away in 2006 at the age of 96 — unfolds over 75 minutes as simply as it is impressive.”
Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung

“Experiencing how the energy of processing the past, of reflection in motion, in ritualistic dances and actions, spreads through the space is profoundly moving and incredibly beautiful.”
FAZ.net

“Everything begins with Harrell's signature movement, Voguing, the defilé style of models. Harrell's fabulous costumes, made from vintage fabrics, get their own moment. But that, too, is already dance, already choreography, already a demand: Do not think of the postmodern dance history as a white, Judson Church-centered narrative, but consider how, in the Harlem Ballrooms of the 1970s, the queer community expressed themselves in this very style.”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“It becomes clear how cleverly reflection is turned into art here. ‘Deathbed’ extends far beyond questions of the entangled paths and buried sources of African American dance, its Caribbean roots, its possible influence from Japanese Butoh. This is also due to the outstanding dancers, none of whom you will forget.”
FAZ.net

“The American dancer and choreographer Trajal Harrell is considered one of the most exciting choreographers. Harrell moves between postmodern dance and ritual, between dance and visual art. His latest work is a co-production between Schauspielhaus and Kunsthalle.”
Radio SRF2

NEWS

Trajal Harrell associate artist 2025 at Holland Festival
As an associate artist Trajal Harrell is creating a highly unique project titled Welcome to Asbestos Hall, which will be presented in June for the 78th edition of the Holland Festival.

+++

For the first time at the Park Avenue Armory, New York: Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow – September 9–20, 2025.

+++

Support the work of the Zürich Dance Ensemble now!

+++

Patronage Committee
The personalities on our patronage committee support Zürich Dance Ensemble with their precious knowledge and their relations.  

Daniel Baumann
Jacqueline Burckhardt
This Brunner
Bice Curiger
Hans Ulrich Obrist

HISTORY

For more than 20 years, dancer Trajal Harrell has been creating pieces for international dance and theater companies as well as museums and art institutions. He is now one of the most important choreographers in contemporary dance and has maintained long-term partnerships with first-class art institutions worldwide with his ensemble for many years.

From 2019 to July 2024, Trajal Harrell led his dance company at Schauspielhaus Zürich with great success. After the end of Nicolas Stemann and Benjamin von Blomberg’s directorship, Trajal Harrell decided to stay in Zurich and found the Zürich Dance Ensemble with administrative and artistic headquarters in the city of Zurich. This is the first time in Harrell’s international career that he and his company permanently united themselves to a city. 

The aim is to create a permanent and visible place for the company in connection with Zurich’s cultural institutions and festivals, to develop dance projects for the population of the city and the canton and, as the Zürich Dance Ensemble, to be internationally touring dance ambassadors for the city of Zurich. 

From the Whitney Museum in New York to the Singapore International Festival of Arts, from the Festival d’Automne in Paris to ImPulsTanz Vienna and the Venice Biennale, as well as in Berlin, Brussels, Rome, Geneva, Lausanne and Bern, the Zürich Dance Ensemble will regularly tour nationally and internationally.

Awards
Dancer of the Year 2018 (tanz magazine), The New York Times counts The Köln Concert among the Best Dance Performances 2023, Silver Lion Venice Biennale Dance 2024, etc.

Produced in Zurich
The Köln Concert, Deathbed, Monkey off My Back or the Cat’s Meow, Das Haus von Bernarda Alba, The Romeo, Tambourines

The American choreographer Trajal Harrell (*in Douglas, Georgia, USA) became internationally renowned for his series Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church and is now a regular guest at the most important international venues for dance and visual arts. The distinctive style of Harrell’s work emerges not only from the unusual combination of seemingly disparate dance languages such as voguing, postmodern dance, and butoh but also, and above all, from the fragility and humor that permeate all his pieces. Aesthetically, his works are always tributes to the performers on stage—he dresses them in carefully selected fabrics and draws significant inspiration from the developments in haute couture, which he sometimes directly incorporates into his performances. His specific movement style transforms his performers into extraordinary and autonomous beings. Harrell himself performs in most of his works. In recent years, his pieces have not only gained increasing recognition in the visual arts world but have also incorporated strong theatrical elements. For example, he engaged with Sophocles' Antigone, created a free adaptation of Shakespeare’s Juliet & Romeo, and reimagined Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for dance and our contemporary era in Maggie The Cat. From 2019 to 2024, Harrell was resident director at Schauspielhaus Zürich, where he led a dance company, the Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble. In Zürich, he directed The Köln Concert, Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow, Deathbed, The House of Bernarda Alba, The Romeo, and Tambourines. In 2023, Harrell was invited to create a work for the renowned Cour d'Honneur at the 77th edition of the Festival d'Avignon. The same year, the Festival d'Automne dedicated a retrospective to Harrell, presenting nine of his works in Paris.

Important works
Porca Miseria (Maggie The Cat, Deathbed, O Medea), Hoochie Koochie, Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (XS-XL), Antigone (XS-XL), Tickle the Sleeping Giant

Notable invitations
Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; Kunsthalle Bern; Aichi Triennial; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Zürich; Fondation Cartier, Paris; Sao Paulo Bienal; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Gwangju Biennale; Singapore International Festival of Arts; American Realness Festival; Berliner Festspiele; Barbican Arts Center, London; ImPulsTanz Festival, Vienna; Manchester International Festival; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kanal Pompidou, Brussels; Festival d’Automne, Paris; The Kitchen, New York; Barbican Centre, London; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Tanz im August, Berlin; Documenta - Parliament of Bodies, Kassel; MoMA, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum and Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou Metz; MoMA PS1, New York; Performa Biennial, New York; The New Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York.

Awards
Dancer of the Year 2018 (Tanz magazine), The New York Times listed The Köln Concert among the Best Dance Performances of 2023, Silver Lion, Biennale Danza 2024.

We regularly collaborate with the following artists; they are part of the Zürich Dance Ensemble. More names will be added soon.

PRESSCLIPPINGS

The Köln Concert 

“Harrell’s signature runway movement, lush and stark, had a new maturity, resulting in a dance that possessed the clarity of a jewel.”
The New York Times

“The evening is meticulously crafted and danced with incredible precision. Yet, it leaves room for interpretations, associations, and subjective feelings.” 
Nachtkritik

“He mixes East Asian dance forms with Western modern dance, movements reminiscent of ancient vase paintings, but also Voguing — the runway style of the queer subculture in New York in the '80s.”
SRF Kultur 2

“The masterpiece of improvisational art becomes, in Harrell's sense, a masterclass of a mourning community. Joni Mitchell may provide the prelude, her voice pure and angelic. But later, with Jarrett, the choreography turns melancholic, earth-heavy, and heartbreakingly sentimental. It is an ode to the farewell of everything that was once an intact body — and a harmonious relationship between bodies.”
NZZ

“[Harrell] has made a career of working black boxes and proscenium stages alike for maximum effect… The theater is his House.”
Artforum

“[Harrell's] unique combination of Black queer movement and high modernist dance offers hope that some artists will not just make it through this moment of crisis, but come out stronger.”
frieze

The Romeo 

“The Romeo without Romeo? This thought is quickly forgotten once the dancing begins. The twelve dancers move so beautifully and dreamily, both tall and stocky, young and older.”
Tanznetz.de

“A grand dance theater that will intensify from performance to performance and continuously ignite new transformation processes. Strongly recommended, not only for dance fans.”
Kulturblogg

“The Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble is essentially the best calling card of the house. It embodies, effortlessly, the wide diversity that directors Benjamin von Blomberg and Nicolas Stemann aim for. The artists, led by house director Trajal Harrell, live boundary-crossing, live the coexistence of different cultures and arts, simply so — without any assertion or proclamation. That’s how theater should be.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Tambourines

“Another masterpiece of literature-inspired choreography.”
FAZ

“Harrell guides his ensemble through the fashion show as though he wants to crown the defilé from ‘The Romeo.’ He also draws lines from Butoh's philosophy to Western culture, much like Raimund Hoghe once did. What emerges is, above all, radiance.”
tanz

“Another reason to love Trajal Harrell!”
The Guardian

“Slut-shaming turns into slut-pride. It’s these movements of interpretation and reinterpretation, inclusion and exclusion, shifts and overlays of longing, faith, morality, and hypocrisy that are explored in Tambourines.”
NZZ

Monkey off My Back or the Cat’s Meow
 

“What a magnificent spectacle!”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“The fashion show can begin. The models take their strides, one foot precisely before the other and always bouncing, some with only their legs, others with their whole body, some in high heels, others barefoot in phantom heels.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“Trajal Harrell's grand dance evening at Schiffbau Zürich combines the pose and pathos of a divided society.”
nachtkritik.de

Deathbed

“‘Deathbed’ is a piece about dying, grieving, remembering, letting go — and is particularly touching in its rigorous abstraction.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“You are drawn into a dancer’s flow, into a performative flow, in which new steps, new movements, turns, new costumes, and new ritual acts are continuously executed and performed. I found it highly impressive. I’m always clear about what was going on, but it was beautiful.”
Deutschlandfunk 

“What sounds difficult — a dance piece meant to commemorate the African American choreographer Katherine Dunham, who passed away in 2006 at the age of 96 — unfolds over 75 minutes as simply as it is impressive.”
Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung

“Experiencing how the energy of processing the past, of reflection in motion, in ritualistic dances and actions, spreads through the space is profoundly moving and incredibly beautiful.”
FAZ.net

“Everything begins with Harrell's signature movement, Voguing, the defilé style of models. Harrell's fabulous costumes, made from vintage fabrics, get their own moment. But that, too, is already dance, already choreography, already a demand: Do not think of the postmodern dance history as a white, Judson Church-centered narrative, but consider how, in the Harlem Ballrooms of the 1970s, the queer community expressed themselves in this very style.”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“It becomes clear how cleverly reflection is turned into art here. ‘Deathbed’ extends far beyond questions of the entangled paths and buried sources of African American dance, its Caribbean roots, its possible influence from Japanese Butoh. This is also due to the outstanding dancers, none of whom you will forget.”
FAZ.net

“The American dancer and choreographer Trajal Harrell is considered one of the most exciting choreographers. Harrell moves between postmodern dance and ritual, between dance and visual art. His latest work is a co-production between Schauspielhaus and Kunsthalle.”
Radio SRF2