Tracing Ruth Sorel is an artistic research project exploring notions of distance & proximity, history & present, the personal & the global through the dancing body and choreography. It traces the biography of the German Jewish dancer and choreographer Ruth Sorel, who fled from the Nazi regime and lived in exile in Poland, Brazil and Canada between 1933 and 1957. The research about Sorel takes on the form of bodily exploration, re-enactment, story telling, archival investigations and visiting geographical sites. While at times there is little factual evidence to be found, imagining that traces exist and can be taken hold of becomes an essential aspect of the endeavour.

Britta Wirthmüller is a dancer and choreographer based in Berlin, Germany. She studied ballet and contemporary dance at the Palucca Schule Dresden and holds an MA in “Performance Studies“ from the University of Hamburg. In her work she attends to that which usually remains invisible, e.g. bodies lacking social visibility in the cycle “Antibodies“ (2009-2012) with Petra Zanki, the forgotten dances of Jean Weidt in “Physical Encounters” (2013) or the hidden layers of a city’s history in “The Silent Walk“ (2010). She holds a position for artistic research and teaching at the HZT – Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin. In 2018/2019 she received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)to spend one year in Vancouver, Canada and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In this capacity she pursued “Tracing Ruth Sorel”, an artistic research along the lines of the life of German Jewish dancer, choreographer and teacher Ruth Elly Abramowitsch Sorel.