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Franz Anton Cramer

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Since 1995 Franz Anton Cramer is working on a regular basis for several German newspapers and international special interest magazines, among them Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Performance Research, ballettanz. His interest as a writer, however, has turned away from the classical journalistic/critical formats to be concerned more with hermeneutical/essentialist explorations of dance and the ways to look at it. He will therefore contribute to Sarma not only critiques, but also texts, articles and essays that would not necessarily be apt for publication in a newspaper. It is his aim to write according to what he wants to say rather than according to what a certain medium wants to publish.

Biography

Franz Anton Cramer, born in 1962, has found his way to dance criticism via a journey through the realms of mime, theatre, professional translation work, an academic education in theatre studies, language and literature, and journalism. He trained and worked as a classical dancer and mime player in France before studying Romance languages and literature in Berlin, graduating with a master thesis on Spanish Poetry of the Baroque age. In 1998 he received his Ph.D. degree with a monography about French actor and theoretician of bodily expression, Etienne Decroux. Currently he is a freelance dance critic and author in Berlin. He has also been giving lectures and seminars on various dance-related topics for universities and dance academies in Germany, France, Estonia, and the Netherlands. He was a member of the editorial committee of the English-language edition of ballettanz from October 2000 until December 2001.

More

• Poetics by Franz Anton Cramer: "I would like to place here an excerpt of a lecture I held on 2nd March, 2003 in Tallinn, Estonia, about my current vision of what dance criticism is all about." Dance Criticism: Negotiating Knowledge, Taste, and Power