Hofgarten Cruise: How to Cruise

Recommended Age: For viewers 16 and older
Content Note: Depictions of sexual acts

“Hofgarten Cruise” isa three-part series by performance artist Thomas Bartling on the topic of cruising. This queer cultural practice refers to the anonymous search for sexual encounters in public spaces. In times of social repression, secret meeting places emerged, hidden from public view. Düsseldorf’s Hofgarten has traditionally been such a cruising spot. 

How to Cruise 

How do bodies move through a space where seeing and being seen, approach and distance, hiding and visibility form a mysterious alliance? 

These specific forms of movement and encounter form the starting point for a choreographic exploration with dancer Jolinus Pape. Cruising is examined as a quality of movement and transformed into choreographic material. Glances, postures, approaches, and evasive movements, rhythms, and spatial relationships become the material for a choreography that moves between observation and interaction. 

The immediate encounter with the dancing body takes center stage. Through eye contact, proximity, and distance, shifting constellations emerge in which the choreographic qualities are conveyed situationally. In this “Cruising Experience Tutorial,” the audience does not experience the movements as observers but becomes part of the choreographic situation itself. The developed cruising choreography can be directly experienced, absorbed, and translated into one’s own body. 

The work combines choreographic research with the social dimension of queer appropriation of space. Especially against the backdrop of increasing repression and violence against queer people, the transmission of such cultural techniques becomes a form of visibility and self-determination.*How to Cruise*understands cruising as bodily knowledge and as a practice in which alternative forms of intimacy, encounter, and community are articulated. 

How to Cruisethusmovesbetween performance, choreographic research, and a format for encounter—and explores how a queer cultural technique can be translated into movement and experienced collectively. 

With Thomas Bartling and Jolinus Pape

Upcoming Dates
October 3, 2026
November 1, 2026

Supported by
Department of Culture of the City of Düsseldorf & Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia

In cooperation with
Aidshilfe Düsseldorf, Queere Geschichte(n) Düsseldorf e.V.