Mask Dance Remixed

“I’ve always wanted to be a model!” The sheer joy of dressing up speaks from the mouth of ten-year-old Sahrah. Amar, Lenni, Amira, Ela, Marta, Sofia and the other students of the 4 D of the Brothers Grimm School in Hamburg spent a whole week drawing on their costumes, selecting material, gluing gold-colored pieces of wood to the fabric with a hot glue gun, creating oversized toes out of egg cartons and braiding an elaborate high hairdo out of an endlessly long yellow plastic cord. The children consulted, exchanged and discarded ideas, coordinated and continued to work, tried on, tested, and repaired what wasn’t fastened tightly enough. Cardboard, blank CDs, fabric scraps, rope, tetrapacks, lanterns, kitchen sieves – everything that seemed usable but was no longer needed was used. In the end, under the guidance of artists Anne Reiter and Vera Drebusch, five fantastic full-body costumes were created – completely in the tradition of their models, the dance masks of Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt from the 1920s.

A cooperation project with the Kulturagenten Hamburg, accompanied by Julia Münz

Video: Martin D'Costa