The Artistic Team for documenta 16: Romi Crawford, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, Xiaoyu Weng, Carla Acevedo-Yates, and Naomi Beckwith (f.l.t.r.), Kassel 2025. Photo: Nicolas Wefers
Aug 21, 2025
Pina Bausch Fellowship for Solitude Alumni Mounir Saeed & Rachel C. Walker
Photo: Lea Gubic, Akademie Schloss Solitude
Congratulations to Solitude alumni Mounir Saeed and Rachel C. Walker!
The two have been awarded the prestigious Pina Bausch Fellowship for Dance and Choreography. We are especially happy that their artistic collaboration began at Akademie Schloss Solitude and will now continue and be supported beyond the fellowship.
Mounir Saeed is an Egyptian artist working with dance and music. In his artistic research, he explores chaos, instinct, and survival – through both body and sound. Key stages of his career include a fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Sphere of Practice Aural & Physical, 2020/2022), participation in La Biennale di Venezia, and a research stay at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior (Field Trip Fellowship in cooperation with Akademie Schloss Solitude, 2025). His choreographies have received multiple awards, among them the 3rd Prize at the Solo Dance Festival Stuttgart and the prize for »Best Theme« at the Festival Teatri Riflessi in Sicily. Through his work, Mounir investigates how movement and sound can reflect social and emotional questions.
As part of the Pina Bausch Fellowship, Mounir will spend six months collaborating in Dresden with composer Rachel C. Walker (Akademie Schloss Solitude fellow in the Aural & Physical Sphere of Practice, 2022). Her interdisciplinary approach bridges music, performance, and theoretical reflection – a perspective that plays a vital role in this collaboration.
Together, they will explore how chaos theory can be applied to music and choreography. Combining theoretical inquiry with practical research—such as workshops—they will examine new ways of artistically expressing group dynamics, employing notation, and integrating musical actions into performance. Rachel’s interdisciplinary practice and her diverse artistic background form a valuable foundation for this joint project.
From the jury statement:
»Through the last decades, dominant contemporary dance aesthetics have been largely Eurocentric and these narratives have also heavily biased dance pedagogy in the Global South. Mounir Saeed is a choreographer from Cairo who’s work intelligently pushes against this norm, not through a return to the past, but rather, via a well-researched move into the interstices of body and sound – evocative of, but not parodying ideas of breathwork and repetition from the country he resides in.
We hope that through this conversation across disciplines, the interdisciplinary will be defined by more than just multiplicity, but rather, by the complexity of hearing and seeing the other.«
A programme of the Arts Foundation of North-Rhine Westphalia and the Pina Bausch Foundation