Nir de Volff

Nir de Volff was born and raised in Tel Aviv, where he studied dance at the Bat-Dor Academy and took his first steps in the city’s professional dance companies. In Tel Aviv, he was a guest performer in Pina Bausch’s Viktor at the Israeli Opera House. In 2000, he moved to Amsterdam and began creating his own works at the DWA Center. In 2004, he moved to Berlin and created his first piece for the Sophiensaele Tanztage festival. Between 2004 and 2008, he danced at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz under the direction of Constanza Macras. In the summer of 2007, he founded his company NIR DE VOLFF/ TOTAL BRUTAL. Since then, the company has been based at the Dock11 Theater, touring worldwide and creating international projects in major cities. In 2013, the production expanded to the Sophiensaele. In September 2014, Total Brutal premiered at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz as part of a collaborative project with theater director Falk Richter; the production was included in the repertory and led to two further international collaborations with Falk Richter for the Vienna Festival and the Teatre National Strasbourg. Nir de Volff has also collaborated three times with the group She She Pop Berlin, with Antú Romero Nuno at the Thalia Theater Hamburg, with Katarina Niminnen at the Volksbühne Berlin, with Nurkan Erpulat at the GORKI Theater Berlin, with Philipp Preuss at the Theater an der Ruhr, and others.

De Volff creates international cultural exchange projects from São Paulo to Macau that combine socio-political themes with entertainment value. He developed a movement method called BBM—Breathing Bodies Movement, which he teaches worldwide at dance and arts centers, art academies, and in the private sector. BBM is designed for dancers, actors, and generally for people who enjoy moving. TOTAL BRUTAL works with a wide range of professional performers and with various theaters, from small venues to national theaters. The work has already been presented at venues such as the Frankfurt Opera, the Grand Theatre Groningen, the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, the Sibiu Festival in Romania, the ZIL Culture Centre in Moscow, the SESC Pinheiros (São Paulo), the Macau Art Center (China), the Esplanade Theatre (Singapore), the Bangkok National Center for Dramatic Art, the Stadttheater St. Pölten (Austria), Warehouse 2 (Jaffa Port), Tel Aviv, Ponec Theatre (Prague), Teatro Alle Tese (Venice), Amphithéâtre de Gesù (Montréal), and other cities in Germany and around the world.

In 2020–2021, de Volff was the first choreographer to be hired by the mixable Forward Dance Company in Leipzig.

In the summer of 2022, de Volff was invited to open the prestigious art festival in Weimar with a collaborative outdoor installation featuring visual artist Sigalit Landau. In 2023, de Volff created the multicultural dance show Club Loneliness for the Macau Arts Festival in China. In January 2024, de Volff’s choreography for the production Peer Gynt premiered at the Düsseldorf State Theater. In October, de Volff was invited to create Everybody Dance Now # Chemnitz at the newly renovated Hartmannfabrik with 23 performers of all ages living in Chemnitz for the opening program of Chemnitz 2025: European Capital of Culture. In May, the production Freedom is a Dancer premiered at the Junges Schauspiel Düsseldorf, co-produced with Tanzhaus NRW. At the invitation of Kulturprojekte Berlin, de Volff choreographed Dancing Memory with six Jewish and non-Jewish dancers as a special outdoor creation centered around one of Berlin’s most important synagogues, the Fraenkelufer, as part of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

One of de Volff’s unique artistic missions is to bring together artists from the „Middle East“ living in the EU, for example for socio-political performances, under the title: Come as you are.