Artists of the National Call 2025
Claudia Auzinger, MusiCare, Darrel Toulon & Jonatan Salgado Romero received funding from the CultureAndHealth Platform for the projects Tanzlabor 60+, Musik auf Station and The Needs of NEETs ... in their own words.
Claudia Auzinger: Dance Lab 60+
Tanzlabor 60+ offers people aged 60 and over in rural areas access to dance as an artistic and creative art form. The format is divided into a (dance) research and creation phase and concludes with a public performance. Dance serves as a means of personal and collective development, as a contribution to active ageing through cognitive and physical stimulation, as well as a space for new social connections - and at the same time contributes to rethinking the image of age and ageing. It is aimed at people regardless of previous experience with dance or collective creative processes. The project is being carried out in collaboration with the "Healthy Community" of Ried im Innkreis.
Claudia Auzinger lives and works as a freelance dancer, choreographer and dance teacher between Vienna and Barcelona. She is co-founder of the company Cia. El Desvío and since 2021 she has been leading the project "Lights on stAGE", which promotes creative processes with people over 60 and is implemented in cooperation with leading cultural and production centers in Barcelona and with the support of the EU, Fundació La Caixa, Generalitat de Catalunya and Ayuntamiento de Barcelona.
MusiCare: Music on the ward
MusiCare was founded by Stefan Heckel and brings together a collective of professional musicians and music therapists who have jointly developed the practice of person-centered music-making and are now trying to establish it in the professional environment of care facilities. Music is developed in a participatory process (conversation) with patients or people from the ward nursing team. The wishes, thoughts, images, hopes and moods described in the process are developed into musical improvisations. Each piece of music is a gift to the person involved.
MusiCare plays music in the following departments/hospitals as part of the "Art meets Health" program
- Cardiology Clinic Landstrasse
- Neurology Clinic Hietzing
- Palliative care unit at Hietzing Clinic
Together with its partner WIGEV (Wiener Gesundheitsverbund), MusiCare has now been able to expand its services to 5 hospitals.
Stefan Heckel is a pianist and Senior Lecturer in Jazz, Instrumental Pedagogy and Artistic Citizenship at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. Since 2023, he has held a teaching position for person-centered music-making on hospital wards at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (MDW).
Darrel Toulon: The Needs of NEETs.
The participants are not the object of intervention, but the subject of the event. The focus is on their perspectives, their experience and their expression. The "Kunst trifft Kultur" funding will be used to produce a film that provides an insight into the workshops held in May 2025 and the transformation of the participants. Darrel Toulon and Spanish videographer and dancer Jonatan Salgado Romero are collaborating with PolitCom Verein für Politische Kommunikation for this project.
Since 1987, Darrel Toulon has worked as a dancer, actor, singer, teacher, choreographer and director on an international project level with professional and non-professional dancers, musicians, singers and actors of all ages as well as in the fields of community and education. From 2001 to 2015, Toulon was ballet director at Graz Opera.
In 2006, he founded "the alpha group" as an independent structure for cultural productions. Darrel Toulon's central research concern is to anchor the "Docu-Dance-Theatre" he has developed as a transdisciplinary instrument for dialogue with marginalized and vulnerable population groups, e.g. with "Children Born of War" from Bosnia and Uganda. He teaches dance at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Vienna. His projects take up the university's Third Mission, e.g. with the long-term unemployed and people from Lebensborn families.
The more art and culture we engage with (both actively and receptively), the more at ease, more balanced, more in tune with ourselves and the world.
More us. More you. Discover our campaign HERE!