Daniel Hellmann - 3art3 Company

Daniel Hellmann | Director, choreographer & artistic director

Daniel Hellmann is a singer, performer, dance and theatre maker from Zürich. He studied philosophy, classical singing and theatre / performance in Zurich, Lausanne and Bern.  Since 2012, he has been developing his own artistic work, touring internationally and winning various awards. Hellmann sees his artistic practice as a form of intersectional activism. His projects explore the body, bodily relationships and desire, and question social norms and power relations in the fields of sexuality, human and animal rights.

As part of his interactive performance Full Service  (2014), Hellmann has executed hundreds of services around the world for a corresponding negotiated fee. His solo performance Traumboy  (2015) on male sex work was selected for Sélection Suisse en Avignon first edition 2016 and for Swiss Selection Edinburgh the new Pro Helvetia’s program for the festival 2019. Recently, Daniel Hellmann developed Traumgirl, in collaboration with Anne Welenc - his third production about sexwork, created in august 2019 and performed alternaly with Traumboy during Edimburgh Fringe Festival.

Since 2017, Hellmann’s work has increasingly focused on the relationships between humans and other animals. The music theatre performance Requiem for a piece of meat (2017) was awarded the June Johnson Dance Prize and invited to the Swiss Dance Days 2019 at Vidy Lausanne.

In 2019 he has also created the performance All in with Layton Lachman and Anne Welenc, on triadic love relationships. With his alter ego Soya the Cow  - a sex-positive, feminist and vegan drag cow, Hellmann also appears in theaters, panel discussions and night clubs and have record his first music album. In 2020, he created Soya the cow: Dear Human Animals at the Gessnerallee Zürich. 

In 2022, he offers a whole range of artistic forms with Soya the cow: performance, concert, exhibition, excusions and mediations, which, after having been presented to Swiss, German and UK audiences, will meet audiences in Seattle, Kansas City, Houston and Los Angeles during a tour organised with the Goethe Institute.

In addition to his own works, Hellmann has created other pieces in variable artistic collaborations - Untold  in coproduction with Les Ballets C. de la B., Nach Lampedusa – Wandererfantasien, about the Swiss asylum system, with Ursina Greuel & Samuel Fried (2014).

Between 2018 and 2020, Daniel Hellmann has been curating the performing arts for the interdisciplinary gender and sexualities festival la Fête du Slip in Lausanne.