Jonas Frey works at the intersection of club and street dance with contemporary choreography — where cipher practices become composition, and personal memory becomes a shared reference. Below you find his path so far, his way of working, and the questions his work keeps returning to.
Photo: © Marie Préaud
Jonas started dancing in 1998, autodidactically, inside Hip Hop and Breaking culture — training in community centers, on the street, in ciphers, jams and battles, learning with his crewmates and from some of the scene's key figures. That grounding never left; it's the root system everything else grows from.
Between 2009 and 2013 he studied at ArtEZ School of Dance in Arnhem (B.A. Dance in Education), then spent the following years freelancing as a dancer, choreographer and teacher across the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany — dancing for different projects including La_Trottier Dance Collective (Mannheim) and TSIB (Zurich), and at festivals such as Moving Futures (Netherlands), Metropolink (Heidelberg) and Schwindelfrei (Mannheim).
From 2015 up to this day he worked in several productions for young audiences as a dancer, co-choreographer and dance mediator with Junges NTM (Mannheim), Schauburg (München), Groundbreakers (Netherlands) and Hennermanns Horde (Frankfurt).
In 2019 he began co-directing the Junior Dance Company at EinTanzHaus Mannheim together with Julie Pécard — a partnership that would shape everything that followed. From 2019 to 2021 he completed an M.A. in Choreography with distinction at Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (Tilburg) and Codarts University of the Arts (Rotterdam), where his research into the space between urban and contemporary dance took the shape it still carries today — published as the exposition negotiating the space in between (Research Catalogue, 2021).
But it's been his own productions that have sat at the center since 2014, when Jeux Tutorial premiered at Theaterfestival Schwindelfrei. Nearly every year since has carried a new piece to the stage — each one testing the same questions from a different angle, and together forming the spine of his artistic practice.
Since 2025 he has been an artist-in-residence at Theater Freiburg within Réseau Grand Luxe, and that same year he and Julie Pécard founded COTA Projects — more on that below.
15
Own productions staged since 2014
Neither abandoning
the roots, nor just
staging them.
On why breaking stays present while its principles translate into contemporary choreography.
Four strands run through everything Jonas makes — on stage, in rehearsal, and in capacity building formats.
Taking apart the building blocks of urban dance — the cipher, the jam, the vocabulary, the composition — and reconstructing their inherited dramaturgy for the stage.
Concepts instead of fixed forms. Each one teach one. Originality as something to strive for. Always a student. These are operating principles behind how Jonas builds and facilitates work.
Collaborators as co-authors, not executors. Each project runs on a loop: build a shared framework, work, reflect, redesign — repeated until the piece belongs to everyone who made it.
The body becomes a site of research — interviews, landscape, history and autobiography translated into physical form. Memory as a starting point to negotiate, fragment and constantly re-embody.
Research, choreographic creation and teaching offer, for Jonas, different angles on artistic practice: the Physical Dynamics research project at ArtEZ School of Dance examined bringing club and street dance into academic training; Movement Journeys, developed with choreographer Silvia Giordano, translates choreographic method into a score-based programme built on full authorship for the mover; and mpower urban, which he has co-directed for three years, opens the space between urban culture and contemporary choreography to emerging artists.
COTA Projects was founded by Julie Pécard and Jonas Frey as a platform for co-creation. The name stands for Choreography, Outreach, Teaching and Activism/Artistic Research — the four strands their joint work moves between. It's the vehicle for their stage work, including the in-creation quintet BORROW, premiering October 2026, and for the wider network of collaborators each production draws on.
Some selected experiences across residencies, research and touring that shaped how Jonas works.
Artist in Residence — Theater Freiburg, within Réseau Grand Luxe.
Pitching Artist, Tanzplattform Deutschland.
Concept Development Grant, City of Mannheim.
Concept Development Grant, LaFT Baden-Württemberg.
Shared Canvas toured to NADAR'ART Festival, Rabat, Morocco, invited by the Goethe-Institut — with Cédric Pintarelli and Johannes Kompa.
Invitation, Tanztreffen der Jugend, Berlin.
Co-organized Urban Dance Utopia at Tanzkongress with Célestine Hennermann — capacity building and activism on a national stage.
Artistic Co-Director & Choreographer, Junior Dance Company — EinTanzHaus Mannheim, with Julie Pécard.
Infinite Games toured with Moving Futures across the Netherlands and Germany — a co-creation with Joseph Simon.
Resident Artist, Freiraum — Nationaltheater Mannheim. A residency programme opening the space of Kevin O'Day Ballet to the independent scene.
Presented research, „Social Constructivism in the Dance Class“, at the NOFOD conference in Iceland, with Netty van den Bosch, Céline Gladpootjes and John Wooter — part of ArtEZ School of Dance's Next Move research programme.
Jeux Tutorial, created with Joseph Simon, premiered at Theaterfestival Schwindelfrei.
People who shaped, and still shape, what Jonas does.
Alongside stage work, Jonas teaches — from academy training to professional development contexts (Fontys, among others) — and has completed further training in facilitation and design thinking (u-lab: Leading from the Emerging Future, MIT; Coach for Design Thinking, Darkhorse Academy Berlin), the foundation for an emerging offer in movement-based facilitation.