Ensemble uBu

UBU is a multidisciplinary ensemble of musicians and dancers. The ensemble develops new concert performances at the points of friction and in the spaces of collison between music, dance and other art forms. uBu exists since 2016 and is based in Cologne.

We are…

Anna Neubert
Magdalena Öttl
Esther Saladin
Sophia Spies
Antonia Stäcker
Christoph Stöber
Yves Ytier

We use our cast of musicians and dancers as a space of resonance and reflection for the following questions:

How does music have a transformative effect on people? How does it exert power over bodies, create identity, ideals and communities?

In the continuous collaboration of the ensemble members, we test the exchange of methods, knowledge and understanding of interpretation.

In our increasingly collectively developed performances, we are interested in consciously crossing the boundaries of formats, role attributions and artistic disciplines, composing new forms of community. uButopian?

News & Echo

New perspectives for future mutations, collisions and explosions: from 2023 on for the next three years, uBu will receive the Ensembleförderung Musik from the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

"That it only takes the right performers to quickly turn the impression of complexity into the opposite was shown by the "Ensemble Ubu" (...) In a mixture of Ballet Mécanique and the aesthetics of René Magritte, of Dada and the theatre of the surrealist Alfred Jarry, everyone acted here in a spectacle that was as grotesque as it was poetic".

(Heidelberger Nachrichten, on the Schwetzingen Festival 2018)

"The dancers sway on a small bench as if under the control of others, become unbalanced, hang in imaginary ropes, on invisible strings. Is it the musicians who, as puppeteers, dictate the movements with their sound? (...)Who dominates whom? Who counteracts what? A play that, without being explicitly political, has a high potential for dealing with today's society."

(Natalie Godziak, Hoertz24, 2019)