Wundertal dance festival

Wundertal is a dance festival that took place in May 2023 in the German city of Wuppertal, which gives you two hints: the name is a play on words and transforms that town into a “valley of wonders”. Secondly, who does so is Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. Wundertal was the first beacon in the theater’s calendar set by newly appointed director-choreographer Boris Charmatz. It involved more than 200 dancers, professional and amateur, and combined dance pieces by him and Pina Bausch.

The promotion material for this event, a series of posters and a program booklet, is the work of Berlin-based agency MOR Design. They were already responsible for the new visual identity of the Tanztheater presented in an earlier post. In some way the designers follow what they conceived of for the theater’s website. The typefaces used are Söhne by Klim for reading text and Origin Super Condensed by Production Type as eye-catcher.

But the specific use of Origin Super Condensed differs between the two projects. While on the website the Slant and the Backslant variants are used to emphasize the diagonal and make the letters dance, here, on the poster, the different instances of the variable font are used to create a defined triangular form. The word is split into three lines of three letters each, going smaller from one line to the next. This way, the letters drag the reader into the poster and towards the dates of the festival.