After engagements at the Texas Ballet Theater and the ballet of the Hannover State Opera, Michael Foster’s repertoire includes many leading roles in ballets by Jörg Mannes (including ‘Madame Bovary’, ‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘Ein Stück Zeit’) as well as works choreographed by Ben Stevenson, Mauro Bigonzetti (‘La Piaf’) and Hans van Manen (‘Five Tangos’). Having trained at the Tulsa School of Ballet, the Tulsa Ballet Center for Dance Education and Houston Ballet II under Claudio Muños, the American dancer has also been active as a choreographer. For ‘New Steps’, the evening for young choreographers at Hannover State Opera ballet company, he contributed the pas de deux ‘Engel’ in 2010, ‘This May Be Our Last Time …’ in 2011 and ‘Storm Birth’ in 2012. He then moved to join Martin Schläpfer’s Ballett am Rhein company at the beginning of the 2013/14 season, where he was able to supplement his repertoire with works choreographed by Martin Schläpfer, Nils Christe, Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins and Marco Goecke, and many others. He made his debut as a choreographer with the Ballett am Rhein in 2016 with ‘Rapture’ as part of the choreography platform “Young Moves”. This was followed by ‘East Coasting’ (2017) and ‘Opus 29’ (2019). In the summer of 2021, he completed his Master’s degree in Dance Pedadogy specialising in professional training in classical ballet at the Palucca University of Dance, Dresden and at the start of the 2021/22 season he assumed the leadership of the Ballett am Rhein’s newly created dance education programme ‘Tanz mit!’ He was most recently seen on stage here as the Fire Captain in Andrey Kaydanovskiy’s ‘Die kahle Sängerin’, as the Grandfather in Demis Volpi’s ‘The Nutcracker’ and the Office Worker in ‘Geschlossene Spiele’. He also worked on ‘The Nutcracker’ as a choreographer.

https://www.operamrhein.de/en/people/michael-foster/

https://www.theater-duisburg.de/jung/tanz-mit/

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Photo by Sigrid Reinichs