Valentin Alfery

Valentin Alfery is a self-taught dancer and choreographer coming from street and club styles. While being rooted in the European jam and battle scene, he started to work in theatre projects in 2004. Together with Dušana Baltić, Valentin is the co-founder and -director of the Austrian dance company Hungry Sharks. Following his first major stage work Falling from 2009, he realized eight feature-length productions, the underwater dance performance Zeitgeist and several short pieces with the Hungry Sharks, as well as creations in commissioned, academic or project-based contexts. Since 2016 the pieces are regularly co-produced by Brut Wien and Szene Salzburg.

From 2018 – 2022 he has been co-curating street art, dance, performance and music within the year-round program of kulturschiene Salzburg (30 outdoor events per season). In 2020 he became part of the puppet cast of the house repertory opera Madama Butterfly by Anthony Minghella at the Vienna State Opera which is being shown ongoingly. In 2024 Valentin Alfery co-directed and choreographed the multi-divisional opera production Die Hamletmaschine by Heiner Müller, composition by Wolfgang Rihm at the state theatre of Kassel, Germany.
Valentin Alfery is undergoing the COMMA masters choreography program (shared between Codarts and Fontys University / Netherlands) from 2023-2025.

His creations can be located on a broad artistic spectrum and differ significantly from each other. They often refer to social topics and contain mostly a strong or specific movement language, the work with abstract elements and a structural logic that he develops by sorting material or finding patterns and connections between topics. Identifying features of his practice are extensive movement collections, a high physicality, repetitive movement patterns, engaging with cross-style principles of street and club styles, as well as the use of an intricate musicality and an interest for finding new movement qualities (e.g. Handsign-Style) and composing images with bodies.