Anna Tafel

Anna is a choreographer and performer who pours herself into every creative outlet. From dance, music, fashion and art she finds a way to add her magical, whimsical, sparkle to everything she touches.

We met studying dance in Fontys University in the Netherlands, Anna in the club and street style department and me in the contemporary department. But it wasn’t until our third year when we both transferred to the choreography department where we truly became obsessed with the other and their work.

Her parents sent her to ballet at a young age but it always felt ‘a bit too lame, classical or formal,’ for her.’ While she was besotted by the coolness of her older sister doing hip-hop and ‘wanted to be just like her.’ She took a hip-hop class for the first time when she was fifteen and things began to click.

‘‘It was really about the elements of hip-hop. A cypher - the circle, everyone would hype you up going inside, you would learn about the basics of the movements and learn about the culture. So I understood that there was so much more to the whole thing than just the movement in itself. For me it was so enlightening to see this surrounding and how it encourages the people to go in there, express themselves and just like be themselves and be supported in that way. It was such a different world for me. It made me feel different towards the style and dance in general.’’

She’d always been very confident and opinionated growing up but through dance a glaring sense of criticism and embarrasment began to rear its head. Which catapulted this ever evolving relationship she has with the artform.

‘‘I feel like dance was like my first ever love and no matter how much I disconnect from it, I know I will always just come back to it. Also like with waaking I think very specifically. Even though sometimes I don’t want to connect to that style as much, I know I will somehow find my way back to it, or it’ll find its way back to me. It was such a journey that I went through with it together, through the people I met there, the experiences and like the growth I did. By practicing, going to cyphers, battling, taking classes. It’s just the channel for me to express myself as a human. When I was in puberty and I didn’t have a clue about myself as a person, dance always carried so much information about myself that I was not able to comprehend yet.’’

This process of discovering herself through dance also lent itself to exploring her process as a maker.

‘‘If I don’t dance, if I don’t move, if I’m not in my body by myself in the rehearsal, what I’m going to create will be pretty detached from me. It’s going to be way more superficial, way more unpersonal because dance is really the information for whatever I want to create. It needs to go through me to express something rather than thinking about it.’’

In the year or two before she was going to graduate high school she was in the madness of trying to figure out what she wanted to do. One of her best friends, who she met through dance and was considered to be one of the best dancers had always said she didn’t want to depend on dance financially as she feared she would loose the love for it. But once Anna saw her friend make the decision to ultimately study dance after investing so much into it she allowed herself to also see it as a possibility.

‘‘ If you do it professionally you can really commit to it as well instead of just being like - oh yeah I do it on the side and I just keep it safe. It really made me think should I do the same because my reasoning was kind of the same. My mom kept saying Anna you’re dancing everyday why don’t you want to make it as a professional as well? Somehow I didn’t really consider it as an option but I knew I wanted to do something creative.’’

She had seen both fashion and photography as possibilities as she was drawn to several creative outlets and adored fleshing out each way she could put her work out there. But each mode lacked the intuition she feels drives her work forward. She stumbled across the Fontys University audition and was persuaded to audition that year rather than to wait. The moment that cemented her decision between dance and photography was the realisation that if Fontys were to take her she would have to study theory. But she knew that she cared so much about dance that even when the theoretical work would be all consuming it would no deter her as she knew it would contribute to the bigger picture of becoming the dancer or maker she wants to be. Whereas the same desire wasn’t there with photography.

‘‘The relationship between dancer and maker was going hand in hand. When I was practicing back in Germany, I had a collective of women who were teaching me and they were already busy with dance theatre for some time. They created an opportunity for us to be dancers in their theatre piece and we could co-create with them. When I had the chance to be on stage and create something that was outside of the frame of hip-hop or waaking, I felt I could really touch upon the things that were personal to me. At the time I felt with theatre you really have the space to create in a way that’s true to what I want to say, I can abstract it, I can play with it. I loved this other approach of looking at dance.’’

Theatre gave her a whole new sense of exploration as opposed to the mindset she’d moulded through doing battles. At the Fontys open day she spotted the choreography department which she had assumed focused on commercial choreography. But instead it intended to dive into who you are, what you’re drawn to, how you work and create as a whole which truly resonated with her.

‘‘I was so not aware of what I wanted to create. With the first year of choreography I was at a point where I really wanted to create a fucking solo. I was training so much and had so much input from different teachers, different styles. It felt like I wanted to create something bigger than myself as cheesy as it sounds.’’

So many of her decisions that led to her first solo creation were flooded with intuition which left her without the understanding of why she was drawn to them. It wasn’t until two years later when she was in the midst of her graduation piece she gained clarity in her decisions, thinking patterns and style. It revealed to her that the driving force between her work is more often than not an essence, a feeling or an energy rather than a clear theme. Even with this realisation her perception of herself has changed drastically since graduating. Instead of dance being her one outlet to explore what she was feeling, she found a new autonomy in deciding when she wanted to dive into an idea.

‘‘In the process of the fourth year, I understood my motives more of creating. That really fucked me up to understand that because I understood that I was creating because it was a little bit of an overcompensation to life. I couldn’t communicate to the outside what I needed or wanted sometimes and I felt like my only outlet became dance or creating then.

Since then I started to act in general the way I created, then I didn’t really have the urge to create from that perspective anymore. It was so psychological it was a bit embarrassing. Before that when I was feeling bad I thought let me create a piece you know? I still do want to explore through the different elements of film, theatre, dance, video or maybe something else but it’s really more from a conscious place - okay I want to make this a thing right now and I want to use all these things to express it right now. I think this is the main thing that changed.’’

So much of what we had all made in the choreography department had been so deeply personal in a truly guttural sense that she now finds herself drawn to work that doesn’t derive solely from her. She was craving the fun in both the work she wanted to be involved in and was drawn to consume and felt so refreshed in experiencing that you can make ‘fantastic work’ without it being weighed down by its own emotional heaviness. Through this she is finding ways to combine her different interests of fashion, dance and videography.

‘‘ I was looking into auditions and open calls every now and then but somehow they didn’t really resonate with me. I do want to work with my dance and create and stuff but I didn’t want to just jump on opportunities if it doesn’t feel good. Then there was this open call for this residency to create something for second hand and I wanted to focus on the fashion aspect specifically. It’s about the vision of like that you kind of need to make people aware that there’s always so much more to it if it’s second hand. So it’s not just an item but a whole story that you’re buying as well. I’m also creating with a friend of mine, Lotte, so it’s just so refreshing to just try out stuff, to be playful, to not be too much in your head. We just create something and see where it takes us. I just wanna have fun with my dance right now, this is what gives me the most energy.’’

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Anna Tafel can be found on instagram @annyousha