Uwe Scholz was born in Jugenheim, Germany on December 31, 1958. At the tender age of 4 he took up ballet classes and moved, two years later, to the Landestheater Darmstadt for training. At that time, he also started piano lessons and began to train his singing voice at the State Academy of Musical Art in Darmstadt.
Ten-year-old Uwe Scholz dreamt of becoming a conductor. Nevertheless, a growing fascination for the multitudinous ways of expression in dance seemed to prevail. At the age of 13 - and one month before Jon Cranko's tragic death -, he was admitted to the Stuttgart Ballet School, where he met Marcia Haydee, who will become his lifelong mentor. Haydee started, influenced and shaped his artistic career. After working in London, Scholz received a scholarship grant for the prestigious Balanchine School of American Ballet in New York.
Uwe Scholz moved on to become a dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet. From the very beginning of his dancing career, Marcia Haydee entrusted him with a range of choreographic assignments. In 1980, Scholz became resident choreographer at the Stuttgart Ballet. He concluded his dancing career then, except for a much noticed solo in a choreography by Maurice Bejart. In the years that followed, he not only produced choreographies for ballet, but was also an opera director (Testimonium Festival in Israel, and "The Magic Flute" in Nuremberg), a choreographer for opera (with Lovro von Matacic, and also with Hans Neuenfels for "Aida" in Frankfurt), and an assistant director for film and drama (with Heyme).
At the age of 26, Uwe Scholz became Artistic Director and Chief Choreographer of the Zurich Ballet. After 6 years in Zurich, he returned to Germany to build and shape the Leipzig Ballet until his tragic and untimely death in 2004. During his impressive career, Uwe Scholz created more than 100 choregraphic works for major companies and venues; among them were the State Opera Vienna, la Scala di Milan, the Stuttgart Ballet, Les Ballets de Monte Carlo (with Karl Lagerfeld), Jiri Kylián's Nederlands Dans Theater, the Testimonium Festival in Israel, the Dresden Semperoper, Frankfurt Theater, the National Canadian Ballet in Toronto, and many more. His main focus was always the score... He loved works by Bach, Bruckner, Mozart, Wagner, Schumann, Schubert, Stravinsky and Bartok as much as contemporary compositions by Udo Zimmermann and Pierre Boulez.
His choreographies are still being staged throughout the world (New York, Paris, Moskow, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Florence, Tokio, Berlin, Munich...).
