choreographer
What was Johann Kresnik 's occupation from 1967 to 1968?
Johann Kresnik Johann Hans Kresnik ( 12 December 1939 – 27 July 2019 ) was an Austrian dancer , and theater director working in the tradition of German Tanztheater ( dance theater ) who is known for his politically charged approach to dance . Early life . Johann Kresnik was born on 12 December 1939 in Sankt Margarethen , in the municipality of Bleiburg in the South Austrian state of Carinthia . It has been said that at the age of three he witnessed the shooting of his father—then serving in the Wehrmacht—by Slovenian partisans . He began his professional life working as a toolmaker , and his career as a performer began almost accidentally when he got a walk-on part at the Graz opera house in the late 1950s . Not long afterwards , unwilling to undertake required military service in Austria due to his antiwar views , he moved to Germany , where he has lived ever since . Although he had a background in gymnastics , he only began serious dance training when he moved to Cologne in 1962 , where he studied with Leon Wojcikowski and Aurel von Miloss . By the time he left Austria , Kresnik had joined the Austrian Communist Party , and he took part in numerous political demonstrations in Germany during the 1960s . He was involved with Marxist activism in Cologne and became acquainted with the German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch in Colognes chess club . Career . In Cologne , Kresnik developed his skills quickly and worked as a principal dancer for the Cologne Opera from 1964 to 1968 . When George Balanchine brought his Nutcracker ballet to Cologne with the New York City Ballet , he was a guest artist for the company . During this period , he also worked with Agnes de Mille and Maurice Béjart . From 1968 to 1978 he was the ballet master and lead choreographer for the Bremer Tanztheater in Bremen . From 1980 to 1989 , he was active in Heidelberg as a choreographer and director . He returned to Bremen for the period 1989 to 1994 , and then beginning in 1994 worked for three years at the Volksbühne Berlin and as choreographer at the Burgtheater , Vienna . For five years beginning in 2003 he led the Choreographic Theater of Bonn . Kresnik is very prolific , having created around 100 full-length works . Among the awards that Kresnik has received for his work are the Berlin Theatre Prize ( 1990 ) , the German Critics Prize ( 1990 ) , and the Berlin Bear ( B.Z . Culture Prize , 1994 ) . In 2011 , a Center for Choreography in Kresniks birthplace of Bleiburg was founded in his honor and named Choreografie Zentrum Johann Kresnik . Artistic style . Kresnik works within the tradition of Tanztheater and Expressionist dance pioneered by Kurt Jooss ( whose piece The Green Table he greatly admired ) and Mary Wigman . He has also been inspired by the films of Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini . He began making work around the same time as Pina Bausch but decided he preferred the term choreographic theater in place of dance theater when referring to his own dance-theater hybrid . From the outset , he has made politically charged work with the intention of subverting both balletic dance norms and social norms . His pieces are often intentionally provocative and have such themes such as imperialism , militarism , terrorism , Nazism , war , murder , suicide , and madness . His outspokenness , Marxist politics , championship of cultural outsiders , and often extreme choreography have earned him a reputation as an enfant terrible and the nickname Berserker . Quite a few of his works , including Paradise ? ( 1968 , about the assassination of student activist Rudi Dutschke ) , Sylvia Plath ( 1985 ) , Ulrike Meinhof ( 1990 ) , Frida Kahlo ( 1992 ) , Francis Bacon ( 1993 ) , Ernst Jünger ( 1994 ) , and Hannelore Kohl ( 2004 ) , have been focused around the troubled lives and achievements of well-known individuals . An unusually large proportion of his works revolve around female protagonists . Ulrike Meinhof is considered the German performance worlds first major attempt to grapple with the impact of the Red Army Faction on the countrys culture . Kresniks first choreographic work , O Sela Pei ( 1967 ) was inspired by texts by people with schizophrenia . It premiered in 1967 and , with its themes of madness , anger , transgression , and death , prefigured many of his later works . Other productions include Mars ( 1983 ) , Macbeth ( 1988 ) , Oedipus ( 1989 ) , Wendewut ( based on a story by Günter Gaus , 1993 ) , Last Days of Mankind , and Vogeler . In his 2008 interpretation of Giuseppe Verdis opera A Masked Ball , he deployed a cast of three dozen men and women all over 50 and naked except for Mickey Mouse masks on a stage representing the ruins of the World Trade Center . Death . Kresnik died on 27 July 2019 at the age of 79 , a coronary heart attack . at Klagenfurt . He had worked on even at a ripe old age , so he presented the revival of his piece Macbeth from 1988 with the ensemble TANZLIN.Z , which opened Vienna International Dance Festival ImPulsTanz 2019 on 11 July 2019 . And he had been honoured the same day with the Golden Medal of Merit of the State of Vienna by the City Councillor for Art and Science . Kresnik had given his personal archive with 40 years of dance history as early as August 2008 to the Academy of Arts , Berlin .