Theater Work

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Hoffmann was educated in Berlin at the Ernst Busch University for Performing Arts, where he studied stage directing under Manfred Karge, Andrea Breth, and cultural sociology with Wolfgang Engler. His fellow students included Jan Bosse and Thomas Ostermeier, who emerged as central figures of a new generation of German directors at a moment when theatre in Berlin was undergoing profound institutional and aesthetic shifts. After receiving his BA in Berlin he studied theatre, performance, and dramaturgy in Amsterdam, where he became part of the early circle around DasArts at University of the Arts Amsterdam, the experimental graduate program founded by Ritsaert ten Cate, the founder of Mickery Theater. These years, together with his time living in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Antwerp, placed him within the Belgian and Dutch performance avant-garde at a moment of major transformation.

He began his career at Theater am Turm TAT in Frankfurt, where he worked from 1992 to 1994 as assistant dramaturg under Tom Stromberg. At TAT he was involved in productions by René Pollesch, Stefan Pucher, Reza Abdoh, Needcompany, Michael Laub, Jan Fabre, Baktruppen, Gob Squad, and Heiner Goebbels, placing him at the intersection of the Flemish Wave, German postdramatic theatre, and emerging hybrid performance forms.

After the TAT he worked in Berlin, directing several productions at the Berlin Workers Theater Berliner Arbeiter Theater bat, part of the Ernst Busch University, staging fragments and adaptations of works by Nikolai Gogol, William Shakespeare, Heiner Müller, and Alexander Ostrovsky. His final production at the bat was Oscar Night, written by René Pollesch in 1996. During this period he also assisted Heiner Müller at the Berliner Ensemble, the playwright, poet, and director who succeeded Bertolt Brecht as a leading figure of postwar German theatre. 

In 1993 and 1994 he worked in New York as an assistant producer at Performance Space 122 PS122, immersing himself in the downtown performance scene. He developed close relationships with members of The Wooster Group including Spalding Gray and Ron Vawter, and with Richard Foreman at the Ontological Hysteric Theater. His exposure to the work of John Malpede and the Los Angeles Poverty Department, as well as the radical productions of Reza Abdoh, shaped his understanding of the political and emotional stakes of performance.

In 1994 he met the New York based art historian RoseLee Goldberg and worked with her as a research assistant on the updated edition of her seminal book Performance Art From Futurism to the Present, deepening his engagement with the history of performance in the context of visual and conceptual art.

With Tom Stromberg he co organized Theater Outlines, the performing arts program of Documenta X in Kassel in 1997.

Beginning in 1998 he worked with Xavier Le Roy, in 1999 with Meg Stuart and her Brussels based company Damaged Goods, and from 2002 to the present he has maintained an ongoing collaboration and intellectual dialogue with Tino Sehgal, whose constructed situations reflect many of the conceptual and dramaturgical concerns that shaped Hoffmann's early formation.

He returned to theatre in 2017 as dramaturg and curator for Brian Belott's first theatre production at the Henry Street Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center in New York as part of the Performa Biennial.