MÖTE MED KOREOGRAF

The Dancing Public - A workshop in collaboration between Dansalliansen, Dansenshus and Danscentrum Stockholm.

In this workshop I would like to share my interest in dance as a social phenomenon and practice. I have always been fascinated with social dances and how they relate to very basic human needs for movement, enjoyment and ecstasy. But perhaps more importantly, how social dances are often also connected to social and political situations and conditions, making them into dances of resistance, modes of warding off hardship, or even strategies of survival. What I propose for this workshop is to research “dancing manias”, a topic I am currently busy exploring in my work, especially in The Dancing Public

Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish choreographer and dancers living and working in Brussels. Her work is characterized by hybridity and engages in extending choreographic practices by combining dance and movement with other domains such as visual arts, technology, language and theory. An important strand of her work was developed between 2009 and 2012 with The Artificial Nature Series, in which she focused on reconfiguring relations between human and non-human agency through choreography. By contrast her more recent series, The Red Pieces (2014-2017) inscribes itself into a history of human performance with a focus on nudity, sexuality and how the body historically has been a site for political struggles. In 2019, she premiered Moving in Concert, an abstract group choreography, that focuses on the interlacing betweenhumans, technological tools and natural materials and in 2021 she premiered The Life Work, an in situ project with elderly people in the Ruhr region in Germany which addresses migration issues. And a new solo, The Dancing Public, inspired by a fascination for dancing manias throughout history.

Ingvartsen holds a PhD in choreography from Stockholm’s University of the Arts and graduated prior to that from the performing arts school P.A.R.T.S. She established her company in 2003 and her work has since then been shown throughout Europe, as well as in the U.S, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia. She has been artist in residence at the Kaaitheater in Brussels, Volksbühne in Berlin, as well as associated to the APAP 

Photo: Bea Borgers