Dance for the next generation: that is – in both senses of the word – the purpose of the young dance company of Theaterhaus Stuttgart. Eric Gauthier had been dreaming of this for a long time. Especially as the social developments of recent years have lent urgency to this cause: Children and young people are increasingly suffering from a lack of movement and social interaction. At the same time, training and career planning for the next generation of dancers is becoming ever more complicated in the face of ubiquitous funding curbs. The name of the solution: Gauthier Dance JUNIORS//Theaterhaus Stuttgart.

Supported by the DIS-TANZ-START programme of the Dachverband Tanz as part of NEUSTART KULTUR, the company started out with four dancers in January 2022. From the outset, the outreach aspect was a key focus. Instead of waiting for the kids to find their way to the theatre, it is the Gauthier Dance JUNIORS who seek them out in their everyday lives to get them excited about dance – and ideally win them over as theatregoers. Since spring 2022, the JUNIORS have been working with children and young people on a large scale with the MOVES FOR FUTURE initiative, made possible by a very special education partnership between the city of Stuttgart, Daimler Truck AG and a number of foundations. The patron was football star Jürgen Klinsmann.

By summer 2025, the two initial formats have reached approximately 23,500 pupils at 80 schools: Presented and explained by Eric Gauthier, the MOVES FOR FUTURE Mobile gives children and young people an inside look into the creative work of a dance company. And of course Eric Gauthier will also encourage his audience to dance themselves. At the MOVES FOR FUTURE Pop-ups, the artistic director of Gauthier Dance uses the big break for a flash appearance on his dance truck – and for getting the whole schoolyard moving.

But working with children and young people is only one aspect of the Gauthier Dance JUNIORS. In the 2023/24 season, the company expanded to six members, and the young dancers are also meant to grow artistically and advance their own professional careers. January 2024 saw the premiere of the JUNIORS' first stage production, RENAISSANCE. With new creations by Rena Butler and Barak Marshall, choreographies by Sharon Eyal, Andonis Foniadakis and Marco Goecke and a short film by Eric Gauthier, the bar was set just as high as for the main company. The JUNIORS rose to the challenge with flying colours and wowed both the audience and the press. In the 2024/25 season, they went one better with two productions of their own. The first programme Dream Team from January 2025 included world premieres by Virginie Brunelle and Barak Marshall, choreographies by Alejandro Cerrudo and Nacho Duato and a podcast format by Eric Gauthier. In July 2025, Barak Marshall's full-length piece Barker become one of the great hits of the COLOURS International Dance Festival. Conceived for the Theaterhaus gym, Barker will also be performed as a mobile format in schools from the 2025/26 season.

ERIC GAUTHIER
Artistic Director
Gauthier Dance//Dance Company Theaterhaus Stuttgart
Gauthier Dance JUNIORS//Theaterhaus Stuttgart
COLOURS International Dance Festival

It only took Eric Gauthier a few years to make it from charismatic soloist of the Stuttgart Ballet to high-profile international choreographer and artistic director of one of Germany's most successful companies. Not least due to his tremendous networking skills, star choreographers and exciting talents from all over the world regularly collaborate with Gauthier Dance – first and foremost the artists in residence Marco Goecke (January 2019 to summer 2023), Hofesh Shechter (since summer 2021), Barak Marshall (from the 2024/25 season), and Aszure Barton (from the 2025/26 season).

At the same time, top companies worldwide have taken Gauthier's works into their repertoire, amongst others the Staatsballett Berlin, the Stuttgart Ballet, Scapino Ballet Rotterdam, Het Nationale Ballet Amsterdam or the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. His tongue-in-cheek insider spoofs Ballet 101, Ballet 102 and ABC became international gala hits, danced by the likes of Roberto Bolle, Johan Kobborg, Xander Parish and Victor Caixeta. His latest creations: the touching pas de deux Les Adieux for Iana Salenko and Marian Walter, premiered in April 2023 at the Ukraine benefit gala Ballet for Life by Iana Salenko in Berlin, and in April 2024 Night on the Bare Mountain for the Bavarian Junior Ballet Munich. Gauthier is also known for his forays into other genres, for example with choreographies for the stage shows of panda rapper Cro, Philipp Poisel, Marianne Rosenberg and Michael Patrick Kelly, the cinema hit Mackie Messer – Brecht's Threepenny Film (2018) or the Grand Show ARISE at the Friedrichstadtpalast Berlin (2021). In December 2023, he made his brilliant directorial debut with La Fest, commissioned by the Stuttgart State Opera, in a music theatre production that became a repertoire hit. Moreover, Gauthier can now also be seen in front of the camera – as the presenter and dance expert of the SWR documentary series Dance Around the World, which takes the television audience to the world's great dance cities. Available in the ARD media library, the first season presents the dance scenes in Tel Aviv, St. Petersburg and the Netherlands, the second season London, Cuba and Montréal. Episodes on Scandinavia and Brazil are currently in production.
Personal kudos for Eric Gauthier include the German Dance Prize »Future« 2011 in the category Choreography as well as two titles in the yearbook of the specialist magazine tanz, as a Great Hope 2016 and in the category Groundbreaking 2022.

As if the meteoric rise of his company weren't enough, Gauthier has now also made a name for himself as a festival maker: In the summer of 2015, the premiere edition of COLOURS International Dance Festival, conceived by Gauthier and produced by Theaterhaus Stuttgart, took the public, the media and the dance world by storm. Another initiative by Eric Gauthier received particular international recognition: the award-winning The Dying Swans Project. The 16 solos provided 64 artists with work during the pandemic and resulted in 16 visually stunning video clips, that were available in the media library of the German TV channel 3sat. Even the German Federal President became aware of The Dying Swans Project. Ever since an exchange via Instagram chat, he has kept in touch with Gauthier, among others when Gauthier Dance performed during his state visit to Canada in April 2023.

As the son of a leading Alzheimer's researcher, Eric Gauthier has acquired an awareness for social issues early on. The Gauthier Dance Mobile format has brought contemporary dance to youth centres, hospitals or to old people's homes right from the very start. At the beginning of 2022, Theaterhaus and Eric Gauthier opened a new chapter in the outreach programme– with the Gauthier Dance JUNIORS//Theaterhaus Stuttgart and the MOVES FOR FUTURE initiative, which is now focussed primarily on schools and the next generation.
Eric Gauthier was awarded the Order of Merit of the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg and is a member of the board of trustees of the Alzheimer's Foundation Baden-Wuerttemberg.



BALLET MISTRESS and DANCERS


Tara Yipp
Tara danced with the Alberta Ballet in her native Canada and the regional theatres in Coburg and Detmold before switching sides as ballet master. For the last twelve seasons, she was engaged at the Landestheater Coburg, where she acted as the right hand of ballet director Mark McClain. Her rich experience is the perfect fit for the Gauthier Dance JUNIORS. Not only has she rehearsed countless pieces by, among others, Uwe Scholz, Mark Spradling, Lode Devos, Jutta Ebnother and of course Mark McClain. She was also a sought-after guest teacher with companies in Germany as well as „back home“, with the Alberta Ballet. Tara's own artistic background is an additional asset for her work with the young dancers. As a choreographer, she has created a number of pieces, including full-length productions such as Dangerous Liaisons and Clockwork Orange.


Ashton Benn
Ashton grew up in Dallas, where she trained at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. This was the perfect preparation for an institution that also played a pivotal role in the CVs of several of her JUNIORS colleagues: the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. As a USC Presidential Merit Scholarship holder, she attended the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, graduating in the summer of 2024 with a bachelor's degree in dance, while also completing a master's degree in arts and culture journalism. During her first-class education, she danced in works by Jiří Kylián, Ohad Naharin, Kyle Abraham and Aszure Barton and many others. For the 2024/25 season, Ashton moved to the Netherlands, as a participant in the Young Talent Programme of the famous Scapino Ballet Rotterdam, performing in choreographies by Nanine Linning, Marcos Morau, and Ed Wubbe, amongst others. In the 2025/26 season, Asthton joined the Gauthier Dance JUNIORS.

Naia Debrota
Born in Slovenia, Naia positioned herself internationally and professionally at an exceptionally early age. She began her dance training in Singapore and moved to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et Danse in Paris at the age of 14. After completing her studies at the end of the 2022/2023 season, she became a member of the Bavarian Junior Ballet Munich and a trainee with the parent company, the Bavarian State Ballet. During this two-year programme, she became familiar with an extremely broad repertoire, ranging from Oskar Schlemmer's iconic Triadic Ballet, John Neumeier's Bach-Suite 3, Pina Bausch's The Rite of Spring to brand new creations by Marco Goecke. The contact with Gauthier Dance came about quite naturally: Eric Gauthier got to know her during the creation of his Night on Bald Mountain for the Junior Ballet. In the 2025/26 season, Naia joined the Gauthier Dance JUNIORS.


Carolina Fernandes
Carolina grew up on the Atlantic coast of Portugal. She discovered her passion for dance at the Ginasiano Dance School in her hometown of Vila Nova de Gaia. At the same time, she complemented her training in workshops and courses, including at the Institut del Teatre Barcelona as well as in works by Wayne McGregor and Shahar Binyamini in the Território format of the Lisbon platform Estúdios Vitor Cordon. Since 2022, she has been enrolled in the bachelor's degree programme in dance at the renowned Codarts – University of the Arts Rotterdam. There she has performed in works by Cayetano Soto, La Horde, Ed Wubbe and Jiří Kylián, amongst others. Through the EU's Erasmus+ funding programme, she will gain professional company experience as an intern with Gauthier Dance JUNIORS during the 2025/26 season.


Mathilde Roberge
Like Eric Gauthier, Mathilde was educated at the National Ballet School of Canada in Toronto. After graduating, she decided to stay on and enrolled for advanced training programmes, most recently the Company Life Programme. The idea behind it: to prepare young dancers in a protected environment for the tough demands of a professional dance career. Mathilde took full advantage of the opportunity and trained, among others, with NBC artistic director Hope Muir, James Kudelka and Rex Harrington. Most recently, she performed in the National Ballet of Canada production Symphony in C, rehearsed by legendary Balanchine répétiteur Joysanne Sidimus. Mathilde will be dancing with the Gauthier Dance JUNIORS from the 2023/24 season.


Atticus Bobbie
Born in Sydney, raised in New York: Atticus had the best starting opportunities – and he made the most of them. Like his three siblings, he trained from an early age at his mother's dance school, the renowned Downtown Dance Factory. His high school was the legendary „LaGuardia“, which combines the normal curriculum with a demanding artistic education. He was also a member of the MOVE|NYC| Young Professionals Program. His studies took Atticus to another top address for dance. As a scholarship holder at the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, he benefited from the excellent teaching and varied repertoire including works by star choreographers such as Kyle Abraham, Justin Peck, Jiří Kylián, Dwight Rhoden, Micaela Taylor, Roderick George and Bret Easterling. The logical next step: Right after his graduation in summer 2024, Atticus joined the Gauthier Dance JUNIORS.


Rong Chang
Rong learned his craft at two of the most internationally renowned dance training institutions – the Dance School of the Taipei National University of the Arts and the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in London. His great talent was recognised early on and won him numerous awards in his home country of Taiwan. After graduating in 2022, he remained in the UK and became a member of the interdisciplinary Fabula Collective. There he danced in Eve by Christopher Marney, among others, which premiered as part of the mixed programme MOMENTUM at the London dance temple Sadler's Wells. In the 2023/24 season, Rong became a member of Gauthier Dance JUNIORS.


Giuseppe Ferrara
Giuseppe comes from Naples. There, he not only attended the Liceo Artistico Coreutico Musicale Palizzi, an arts grammar school with a focus on dance, but also took courses at the Mirò Academy in a wide variety of dance styles, ranging from ballet to modern and contemporary dance to Latin American, hip-hop and Afro dance. Since 2023, he has been enrolled in the Bachelor's programme in Contemporary Dance at the Zurich University of the Arts. At the ZHdK dance performances at the Theater der Künste, he has appeared in choreographies by Antonio Ruz, Nadav Zelner, Phoebe Jewitt, Caroline Finn, Béatrice Goetz and Dor Mamalia, among others. Through the Swiss-European Mobility Programme (SEMP), he is gaining professional company experience as an intern with Gauthier Dance JUNIORS during the 2025/26 season.


Giuseppe Iodice
Born in Naples, Giuseppe discovered a passion for dance at the age of three, a love that has accompanied them ever since. At 14, they began their professional training at Eugenio Buratti’s dance school, Dancer at Work, in Florence. Just two years later, they transferred to the State Ballet School in Berlin, enrolling in the bachelor’s programme in Stage Dance in cooperation with the Ernst Busch University of Theatre Arts. This dual training in dance and drama proved to be a powerful foundation for their artistic growth. In 2023, Giuseppe was selected as one of only 16 dancers worldwide to participate in a three-month residency at La Biennale di Venezia – College Danza, under the direction of Wayne McGregor. Over the course of their developing career, they have performed in works by, amongst others, William Forsythe, Jeroen Verbruggen, Xie Xin, and Jiří Kylián. During the 2024/25 season, Giuseppe joined the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre in Ostrava, where they were awarded the Ceny Jantar for their performance in Marco Goecke’s Firebird duet. In the 2025/26 season, they became a member of Gauthier Dance JUNIORS.

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