Ricardo Viviani

Ricardo Viviani is a choreographer, Oral Historian, researcher and mentor whose work connects dance practice, Oral History and dance heritage. Based in Wuppertal, Germany, he worked for ten years at the Pina Bausch Foundation, where he developed an Oral History programme with dancers and other professionals involved in the work.

Since 2016, Viviani has conducted approximately seventy Oral History interviews with dancers and others involved in Tanztheater and related artistic practices. The interviews are multilingual and multi-generational and are documented through video, transcription, subtitles, indexing and archival cross-referencing. Together they form a growing body of material in which personal testimony can be considered alongside photographs, programmes, 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. Recent contributions include Embodied Knowledge Articulated — Reflections on Ten Years of Oral History Collection at Pina Bausch – From Ritual to Romance (Bergische Universität Wuppertal, 2026), Oral History for Dance Heritage at the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv (2025), and Beyond Words: Crafting Oral Histories in Dance and the Arts at the 23rd IOHA Conference in Kraków (2025). Earlier presentations include work at CoFestival (Ljubljana), SPED São Paulo Escola de Dança, IETM Belgrade, the Dance Studies Association and the Oral History Association. His co-authored chapter Sharing the Material is Sharing the Knowledge was published in Jahrbuch TanzForschung by transcript Verlag in 2022.

This research developed from more than four decades of artistic practice. Born in São Paulo in 1960, Viviani began his dance training at Ballet Stagium and later studied at the Joffrey Ballet School in New York. He danced with Balé da Cidade de São Paulo, Cisne Negro, Manuel Alum and Dancers, and the Tanztheater ensemble of the Nationaltheater Weimar. He also performed in A Chorus Line and Oh! Calcutta! on Broadway and on international tours, and worked in film, television and independent productions in Brazil, Europe and the United States.

As a choreographer, Viviani created independent works in São Paulo, New York and Cologne, as well as choreography for opera and Music Theater in Germany. His productions include Street Scene, Die lustige Witwe, Gegen die Wand, Das Wundertheater and L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, alongside works produced under his independent label mammut tanzproduktion. He was also script writer for the documentary Pina Bausch + New York.

His artistic formation was influenced by teachers and mentors including Rolf Gelewski, Bessie Schönberg, Alfredo Corvino, Louis Falco and Bill Irwin. These relationships form part of a wider lineage of dance practice through which composition, movement, performance and teaching were transmitted.

Viviani has taught modern dance technique, choreography and composition at the State University of New York, Dutchess College and Folkwang University of the Arts, and has led workshops and masterclasses in different contexts. His teaching draws on his experience across ballet, modern dance, composition, performance and related movement practices.

His current work focuses on Activating Archives and on new ways of working with embodied knowledge in artistic and educational practice. He is interested in how dance knowledge moves between bodies, stories, documents and institutions, and in what remains particular to human embodied experience as new Knowledge Technologies develop.