A Rising Star in Danish dance

Mette Ingvartsen (born 1980). Trained as dancer and choreographer at P.A.R.T.S in Brussels (2004). Works in Copenhagen, Brussels and Berlin.

Artistic Profile
While still in her dance training Mette Ingvartsen made a well-noticed entrance in the dance scene with the short piece Manual Focus (2003). With her candid views she manages to breathe new life into threadbare themes like ‘the moving body’. The moving body itself, as an object with its own enticements, is the central element in her choreographies.
Mette Ingvartsen is a rising star on the Danish dance scene, though primary based in Brussels. Her propositions are meticulous and her design is explicitly conceptual, and at the same time elaborated with humour, inviting and ambiguous.
The choreographies are at one hand sensuous and bizarre, and on the other hand perfectly composed. In spite of her young age Mette Ingvartsen already has a well developed dance idiom of her own, in both solos and ensemble works.

Current Productions

Why We Love Action
(2007)
Experimenting with excessive expression from a cinematic point of view, the performers cry, fight and kill, search buildings, avoid explosives, hang of cliffs and smash their heads against tables for the pure pleasure of effective experiencing.
Interested in the physicality of stunt coordination the performers create doubles of movie characters, voices, sounds and images. What happens from a perceptive point of view when the "real" characters are fully replaced by their anonymous doubles, and when their effects are extracted and redoubled? What kind of theatricality comes out of such an experiment? It's no longer about following a logic of cause and effect, but rather about effects making up a logic of their own.

To come
(2005)
Working on notions of pleasure and desire, Mette Ingvartsen questions how bodies perform as part of a group, as part of an intimate relation, or as the part of being individual. A rethinking of how bodies can connect and reconnect so that new forms of enjoyment can arise. The choreography proposes an excessive body of pleasure, an overexcitement of speed and vibration produced by five sensual figures.

50/50
(2004)
The solo works on extreme and spectacular expressions as a physical practice rather than through psychological motivations. Movements deriving from clearly coded situations, like a rock concert, an opera or a circus number are processed until they obtain a certain kind of deformed expressivity. It looks like affects rather than emotions, except no one knows what affects look like…

Manual Focus
(2003)
Manual Focus is turning faces 180 degrees, arms and legs upside down and swapping the front with the backside of the body. Exchanging bodies from animals, disorganized creatures to headless humans and other unnamed categories. Masks of old men on the back head of three nude women transforms them into a 12 legged organism, crossing out their identity by covering their real face with the artificiality of a mask.

Review Extracts

”To Come is a performance that unties erotic suggestion from sex roles or direct satisfaction. There is no room for individual pleasure. What is shown here, is a lot more suggestive and unfocused. And it is not restricted to the players: shimmering, it oozes into the house, into the audience’s bodies.”
De Standaard (BE), To Come

“Um Androgynität, um einen “Cross X” zwischen männlichen und weiblichen Merkmalen und eine aus der Instabilität entstehende Monströsität soll es gehen. Und dann sieht man auf der Bühne genau das - und es ist umwerfend komisch, intelligent und genau, voller surrealistischer, überraschender Bilder und unglaublich erfrischend.”
Berliner Zeitung (DE), Manual Focus

International Tours