Jemima Rose Dean
Dancing for Her Life

Despite traumatic experiences during her training, Jemima Rose Dean was able to make her dream come true: she pursued a career as a dancer and choreographer at the major dance houses and theatres of Germany and Europe, and now she’s working on productions of her own.

Ballet. Ballet was all she knew, and all she could do. That’s how Jemima Rose Dean describes her vocation in an opinion piece for weekly magazine Die Zeit in summer 2022. Now 32, she spent months training and practising at the ballet academy in Sydney in her home country of Australia: a dance career in Europe was her dream.

Receiving a scholarship to Tanzakademie Zurich brought her closer to this goal. Only a small number of talented dancers manage to get into this school, and the top stages are open to diploma students after the course. Jemima Rose Dean got her qualification too, but she paid a high price for it: today she talks about the drill and humiliation she experienced during her training, about the eating disorders and abuse of power on the part of the school leadership team and teachers. She suffers from anxiety to this day.

A Successful Dancer and Choreographer

But despite all the adversity she endured, she continued her professional career: in 2009 she was a Prix de Lausanne finalist, in 2010 she became a Corps de Ballet dancer at the Bayerisches Staatsballett, three years later she was part of the ensemble at the Friedrichstadt-Palast in Berlin. She danced in productions by John Neumeier, John Cranko and William Forsythe, and worked with artists like Thierry Mugler and Jean-Paul Gaultier. In 2012 she achieved her Bühnenreife-Diplom (diploma of stage readiness) at the Iwanson International School of Contemporary Dance.

Then in 2017 she took the leap into independence: as a freelance dancer she quickly secured roles – in Basel in the musical Ein Käfig voller Narren and in the opera La Gioconda at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. Alongside that, she began writing choreography of her own, such as for Terra X, a work by Johanna Bruckner. She started to be noticed in television too: she worked as assistant choreographer on the successful series Babylon Berlin. She also belonged to the Ballet of Difference ensemble, which received a Faust nomination in 2020 for its performance of New Ocean (Richard Siegal, Schauspiel Köln).

Love, Life and Physicality

She addresses the themes of love, life and physicality in her own performances and productions. For instance in her installation gaia16aye, which is inspired by Plato’s Symposium and the well-known fable of the spherical humans trying to find their other half; and also the production At the Core, a performative approach to an encounter between two human bodies as a heat generator.

During her dance residency in Montreal in 2023, for which applications were handled by the local Goethe-Institut, she hopes to make “Feral Feminism” the focus of a solo performance. She lives an openly queer lifestyle, and feels that working on this performance – which she calls The Feral Womxn – will give her the opportunity to explore her own social and professional influences within the context of her womanness, and possibly liberate her from any prejudices relating to femininity, freedom and beauty – or at least help to reveal them.

As she says herself – and her comprehensive portfolio is evidence of this – she has found her own creative voice. And what about ballet? It isn’t all she can do anymore, not by a long way.