The body.

In my choreographic work, the body moves into the centre of reflection in different contexts with all its possibilities and conflicts: the heroic body, the vulnerable body, the social body, the material body, the transparent body, the naked body, the poetic body, the body as a unit of survival, the body as a place of process and experience of time and space.

Why choreo­graphy?

Growing up in an artistic family of musicians, choreographers, visual artists and directors, choreography seemed to me to connect and embody all disciplines. In my work, characterized by over 15 years of musical training that also honed my auditory perception, I became aware that I perceive movement primarily as a tonal trajectory and, based on my interest in the visual and cinematic, as a living image.

Inspired.

I have been particularly inspired by the work of John Cage, his interdisciplinary collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham and especially his way of working with silence and chance, which redefined the artistic experience and aesthetics of performances. The issues surrounding kinaesthesia, perception, affect and sensation are central to my work. By exploring sound and listening processes, I observe and experience how the physical space of a performance unfurls. The dancers perceive the space as a constantly growing and changing experience primarily through hearing, touching and responding. The hierarchy of sensory perceptions is changed. Seeing no longer comes first. The space becomes perceptible, tangible or audible.

Meta-moder­nist artist.

Seeing myself as a meta-modernist artist, I use a variety of artistic elements in my work including video, text, sound and light. This is reflected in my many years of interdisciplinary collaboration with musicians such as the Düsseldorf-based composer HAUSCHKA, the London-based composer Marios Takoushis, and the visual artists Marianna Christofides and Horst Weierstall. By experimenting with various production structures and artistic exchange practices, works for theatres, museums and urban spaces are created including site-specific works, films and texts.

Content and concept.

With regard to content and concept, I concentrate on artistic projects that sensitize us to ecological and socio-political issues: environment and movement, reality and fiction, archaeology and the future, chronology and choreography, topographical and personal boundaries, the invisible and the hidden. I open up spaces for dancers, performers and the audience, in which themes, thoughts and emotions are negotiated through movement—themes, thoughts and emotions that cannot be adequately expressed through language or other forms of expression in times of social upheaval and political extremes.

Empowerment.

For me choreography is an act of empowerment, of embodiment, of social responsibility, an act of bridging time sequences, a process of layering experiences and negotiating different forms of perception of encounters. It is a space for associations, investigations, transformations, interruptions and connections between representing and non-representing bodies, between spectators and non-spectators—spaces of thought and perception between the inner self and the outer world.

I want to continue my work with these methods, practices and in these contexts in the coming years and create pieces that weave together movements, actions, things, people and situations as poetry, and continue to reflect with clarity the beauty, darkness and complexity of human experience and the world around us.