Ricardo Viviani

Ricardo Viviani is a choreographer, Oral Historian, researcher and mentor whose work connects dance practice, Oral History, dance heritage and cultural institutions. Based in Wuppertal, Germany, he has worked for more than four decades across Brazil, the United States and Europe as a dancer, choreographer, teacher and researcher.

Born in São Paulo in 1960, Viviani began his dance training in Brazil and later studied at the Joffrey Ballet School in New York, Theater Direction at the University of São Paulo, and Cultural Sciences at the FernUniversität in Hagen. His artistic career has included performance, choreography for opera and Music Theater, independent productions and dance education.

As a choreographer and performer, Viviani has worked across different forms of theatre and dance. Among the projects that mark different aspects of this trajectory are Hans Werner Henze’s Das Wundertheater, for which he performed in the 2005 Theater Osnabrück production and its subsequent 2006 CD recording; Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges; and Gegen die Wand, Ludger Vollmer’s opera based on Fatih Akin’s film, presented at Theater Hagen in 2011. In Gegen die Wand, contemporary reviews drew particular attention to Viviani’s choreography and to its relationship to the characters’ cultural and emotional conflicts.

His work has increasingly explored the relationship between dance practice, memory and knowledge. For ten years, he worked as an Oral Historian at the Pina Bausch Foundation in Wuppertal, where he developed and conducted Oral History interviews with dancers and other professionals involved in Tanztheater and related artistic practices. Since 2016, he has conducted approximately seventy interviews, creating a multilingual and multi-generational body of material in which personal testimony can be considered alongside photographs, programmes, video, documents and other archival sources.

His research asks how knowledge developed through dance can be articulated without separating it from the bodily and social experience in which it is formed. His approach draws on his experience as a dancer and choreographer and pays attention not only to what people say, but also to the ways memories emerge through gesture, demonstration, pauses, breath, movement and the circumstances of the interview.

Viviani has presented this work internationally through lectures, workshops, conferences and publications. His research has addressed Oral History, dance documentation, embodied knowledge, archives and the transmission of dance heritage. In 2022, he co-authored Sharing the Material is Sharing the Knowledge, published in Jahrbuch TanzForschung by transcript Verlag.

In 2025, Viviani led Oral History for Dance Heritage at the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, working with Ukrainian artists, researchers and museum professionals to explore ways of documenting and preserving dance as cultural heritage. He was a co-author, with Darina Yakymova and Viktor Ruban, of the resulting Protocol for Archiving Dance, which proposes an institutional framework bringing together documentation and metadata, Oral History and reperformance. The project extended his experience in dance documentation into the practical question of how dance can enter the collections and working structures of a museum.

His current work focuses on Activating Archives, embodied knowledge and new ways of bringing dance heritage into artistic and educational practice. He is interested in emerging Knowledge Technologies and in exploring what remains particular to human embodied experience. He is also developing new connections between artists, archives, researchers and cultural institutions, bringing knowledge from the past into dialogue with art in the present and desirable futures.