The Vienna International Dance Festival (or Vienna ImpulsTanz) is a five-week intensive contemporary dance festival which takes place every year in Vienna, Austria. Thousands of professional dancers, dance teachers and choreographers attend this festival each year, with over 40 productions in ten theatres held over these five weeks, and over 80 workshops in contemporary dance, modern dance, ballet, improvisation, repertoire and composition, Butoh, jazz, hiphop, world dance, and theory, as well as coaching sessions with budding choreographers.
The festival began in 1984 when Vienna’s cultural manager Karl Regenburger and choreographer Ismael Ivo launched the Internationale Tanzwochen Wien (International Dance Week Vienna), with over twenty workshops offered by six teachers for a week. In 1988, the organizers decided it was high time to infuse a performance element to the workshop festival and the event came to be known as the ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival, pioneered with works by Wim Vandekeybus, Marie Chouinard and Mark Tompkins.
Currently, the festival has several components aside from performance and workshop, most notably a research aspect including the CoachingProject, where new choreographers are being mentored by older, more experienced professionals, the ProSeries, for professional choreographers to further explore philosophies and processes, and the Choreographers’ Venture, which is a group project with a facilitator, meant to explore new concepts and collaborations. Another aspect of the festival is the danceWEB Europe, a scholarship programme which has, since 1996, offered over 650 young dance artists from all over the world the opportunity to enjoy the full benefits of the Vienna ImpulsTanz Festival for free.
Aside from all these programs for professional dancers and choreographers, ImpulsTanz is also directed to beginning dancers. There are several levels available among the offered workshops, and workshop classes are tagged as either open for all levels, or particularly tagged for beginning, intermediate, advanced and advanced* levels. Beginning levels workshop classes offer mainly basic knowledge and practice, and do not require previous dance experience. Performances may charge between 7 to 70 euros, depending on who is performing.
ImpulsTanz happens every summer in Vienna, with final schedules for that year announced as early as March on the official Impulstanz Festival website. Scholarship hopefuls should begin looking for information at the danceWEB Europe website by September of the previous year, as scholarship applications close in January of the year of the festival.
Participation in workshops may be booked by workshop, with special fees for packages of workshops. Participants are also required to pay a one-time registration fee. There are discounts for young practicing professionals, Golden Age participants, Youth and Kids. Online reservation of workshops usually begins in May.
Most of the ImpulsTanz workshops will be held at the Arsenal, Burgtheater-Probebühnen
Salzburg Festival