Sankt Margarethen
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.