Daniel Williams was born in Edinburgh in 1969 and graduated with a PhD in Music from the University of Edinburgh in 2002. He has over twenty years' experience of working with sound and music in the theater. Earlier training included studying English literature at Oxford University. He has lived in Dresden since 2009.

Between 2004 and 2016 he worked with composing music, design and sound management for Theater Derevo, a Russian theater company, and toured the world with a variety of award-winning shows including "Ketzal", "Harlekin" and "Mephisto Walz".

Over the last ten years he has worked with a number of theater companies in Dresden, including the guts company, JuWie Dance Company, theatrale subversion and Freaks und Fremde.

He collaborated with Freaks and Strangers and focused on music for figurative and object-based theater. He has toured extensively throughout Europe and South America with a variety of performances for which he has written and performed music.

He also worked with Heiki Ikkola on a series of improvisation evenings, creating two performance strands: Freakstadt, evenings of mixed theater performances, and Blind Date, evenings of pure improvisation in which he spontaneously brought together a musician and a dancer for a group of short performances.

As a member of "Das Gegenteil", he has been involved in numerous workshops and performances over the past seven years or so. He also made music for a series of workshops in Athens in 2022 entitled Xenobiology. Music from these workshops appeared on the album "Athens Notes" (see below for a Bandcamp link).

He debuted as a director in 2021 at TrashEra in Berlin with the dance and music theater piece SLOGANS. Later performances of SLOGANS took place at ACUD and MaHalla in Berlin. In this work, he attempts to strengthen the sense of ritual in theater by combining minimal text, dance and rhythmic experimentation to create a new kind of theatrical world in which ideas and images are suggested and proposed from a distance. SLOGANS transforms questions into statements and provocations, eliciting different meanings from the audience. In a sense, SLOGANS attempts to integrate an explanation of the show - as if from a post-show discussion - into the show itself. These explanations are subject to the same processes as everything else in the show, and likewise the show's explanations are not outside of the show.

During the COVID pandemic, he worked closely with artist Anna Steward and produced an app and film called "Zooomworld", available on Google Play and the App Store.

In 2024, his long-awaited collaboration with Russian director Maxim Didenko follows with a performance based on Kafka's "The Castle", which will be shown at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden in the spring of the same year.

Photo: Peter R. Fiebig