The American dancer and choreographer Richard Siegal (1980) has been an influential player in the German dance and theatre world since 1997. Siegal grew up in a small town in New Hampshire, where there wasn’t a lot of dance to be found. The day after he graduated high school he moved to New York to pursue a career in dance. He ultimately ended up in Germany, where between 1997 and 2004 was a soloist with Ballett Frankfurt, working under the legendary choreographer William Forsythe. In 2005 Siegal decided to turn his own ambitions as a choreographer and theatre-maker into a reality and founded his own multidisciplinary platform, The Bakery. Between 2005 and 2015, he remained affilitated with his mentor’s new dance ensemble, The Forsythe Company, as an associate artist. Like Forsythe, Siegal takes the basic movements of classical ballet as his starting point. He pares them down to their essence and combines them with insights from other art forms such as architecture, fashion, design, performance, live music, spoken word and new media. His work has been honoured with numerous prizes, including a Bessie Award, the Deutscher Theaterpreis Der Faust, the prize awarded by the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques and the Münchner Tanzpreis. Siegal has also been affiliated with numerous prestigious art institutions, including ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the Baryshnikov Arts Center. In 2016 he established a new ensemble, Ballet of Difference, as a progressive, contemporary riposte to the conservative art form of ballet. Between 2015 and 2017 he created a triptych for the Ruhrtriennale Festival, based on Dante’s Divine Comedy.