Anet Fröhlicher
artistic direction & choreography



With education and advanced training in flamenco dance, classical dance and contemporary dance, Anet Fröhlicher performed on stage with various ensembles. Since 2001 Anet Fröhlicher has been artistic director of the Company el contrabando, whose productions have been seen during national and international guest engagements and tours on various continents. The current focus of her work is the artistic exploration of societal phenomena and contradictions, the exercise of power, perpetrator and victim phenomena, justice and injustice, guilt and innocence and the latent self-destruction of humanity.

Previously Anet Fröhlicher explored for many years the issue of how Flamenco dance, which is characterised by tradition and saddled in part with clichés and pathos can be brought on stage in new contexts, away from its usual characteristics and aesthetic obligations. As a Swiss woman she encountered this dance form “from outside”, which gave her the necessary freedom to penetrate uncompromising new structures in this dance form.

Together with her partner, the artist Reto Emch, she travels across Europe, North & South America, Russia and Japan with projects in the genres of dance and visual art, and enjoys intensive exchange with people from different cultural and societal circles there; this helps her to understand the planet not only in a theoretical but also a practical sense, to correct existing prejudices and, time and again, to learn, understand and scrutinise.