Character and Action
What does the character want? Which needs or values are at stake? What stands in the way? These questions can lead to specific tasks to be tested in the studio.
Artistic Position
Choreography of Relationship
The core choreographic question is: How does one person's action change the possibilities available to another? The four projects explore perception, collaboration, dignity, boundaries, and autonomy.
Classical ballet movement is not considered merely as technical form. Gaze, distance, rhythm, touch, spatial pathways, and responses can suggest what a character wants and what their actions mean for others. Observable movement, possible motivation, and dramaturgical interpretation are kept conceptually distinct.
Technique and Meaning
Movement quality, space, pace, partner interaction, and musical phrasing are combined to explore how relationships and conflicts can become legible to an audience.
Artistic Background
Experience in Staged Photography
Before developing his ballet projects, Mathias Ellmann participated in staged photo and stock-photography productions over several years. The documented series include a wedding, everyday encounters, apartment hunting, shopping, and festive group situations.
By his own account, his interest went beyond outward posing: he sought to understand the human situation he was portraying. Gaze, posture, timing, and a shared action can suggest how characters relate to one another.
This experience informs his current interest in character, motivation, and physical expression. It is not presented as formal actor training, a professional ballet-dancing career, or evidence of staged choreographic productions.
Personal Practice and Movement Analysis
Experiencing Ballet and Investigating Movement
Mathias Ellmann also practices ballet himself. This personal movement experience complements his conceptual exploration of technique, coordination, body awareness, and musical movement sequences; it does not imply a professional dancing career.
The Ballet Movement Lexicon he has developed brings together classical ballet terminology and phrases with technical descriptions, body knowledge, teaching considerations, and choreographic variables. Distinguishing observable technique from possible dramaturgical meaning supports the development of movement sequences and character relationships.
Education · Motivation · Publications
From the Teaching Tree Model to Ballet
His teaching background includes higher education and professional training, as documented in his publications. His work explores how complex subjects can be planned and communicated with attention to learners' needs. Mathias Ellmann is the owner and a trainer at SemaTrain.
The Original Teaching Tree Model
The 2022 article Effektives Lehren und Lernen in der Informatik, Wirtschaftsinformatik und verwandten Fachgebieten, published in Informatik Spektrum, introduces a model with planning and motivation at its core, alongside teaching and learning processes and their evaluation.
Original Article (German) and DOIThe Ballet Teaching Tree
This specialist book develops the teaching approach for ballet, addressing body knowledge, motivation, instruction, technique, recovery, self-respect, and artistic development.
Specialist BookLeni and Oscar and the Secret of the Ballet Tree
The children's book explores learning, patience, body awareness, and practicing together through a story set in a ballet studio.
Children's BookCommunication and Collaboration
His second 2022 article, Effektive Kommunikation in Scrum und der agilen Softwareentwicklung, examines verbal and nonverbal communication and conflict in software teams. It provides a conceptual reference for communication in rehearsals, not evidence of prior professional ensemble productions.
Original Article (German) and DOIRelated writing on the German ballet pages addresses motivation in ballet and fair self-assertion as part of learning and mutual respect.
Artistic Conviction and Mutual Agency
The Work, the Collaborators, and Their Response
Three relationships matter when presenting a choreographic concept: the choreographer's commitment to the work, collaboration with other people, and their independent engagement with the work itself. An artistic proposal should convince through its qualities and through testing in practice, not simply through the personality of its originator.
This is an independent adaptation of a relational triangle described by Werner Correll in the context of leadership and sales. Dancers and theatres are not treated as customers whose attitudes should be transferred to them. Their expertise, autonomy, rights, and production circumstances remain essential.
Conceptual reference: Werner Correll, Motivation und Überzeugung in Führung und Verkauf, chapter 11 (“Das Problem der Überzeugung in Führung und Verkauf”). The application to choreographic collaboration is an independent adaptation.
Choreographic Projects
Four Works, Four Questions of Relationship
The four projects are developed as choreographic and dramaturgical concepts with supporting documents. Rehearsals and stage versions are intended to be undertaken with professional ensembles.
Become Visible
Perception and the question of how a person becomes visible to another.
Built Together
Collaboration, shared responsibility, and mutual support.
Stay Upright
Dignity and the challenge of retaining agency when stability is threatened.
The Primal Struggle
Boundaries, autonomy, and competing claims on shared space.
Artistic Realization
From Concept to a Stage Version
The intended next step is collaboration with professional dancers, theatres, and, where appropriate, artistic assistants. Technical rehearsal, adaptation to an ensemble, and assessing the actual stage effect are distinct steps that written concepts cannot replace.