Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish dancer, choreographer and performance artist who has been active since the early 2000s.
Training
Mette Ingvartsen came into contact with the dance world at a very young age; she was a member of the Junior Company led by the Swedish choreographer Marie Brolin Tani in Aarhus, Denmark. Since 1999, she subsequently studied in Amsterdam and Brussels, where she graduated in 2004 from the dance school P.A.R.T.S., which was founded by choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Afterwards she obtained a PhD in choreography at UNIARTS / Lund University in Sweden. Its subject was the relationship between an artist's theoretical work and their artistic practice.
Work as a choreographer
Since 2002 Mette Ingvartsen has worked in Brussels on an oeuvre of choreographies, performances and 'living installations' that are both conceptual and very physical. Her artistic work never sets apart from research and theoretical concepts. She created her first performance, Manual Focus (2003), while still studying. After that she initiated various research projects and created a wide range of performances, including 50/50 (2004), to come (2005), Why We Love Action (2007), It’S In The Air (2008), Giant City (2009) and All the way out there... (2011). Questions about kinesthesia, perception, affect and sensation are central. Although she studied for four years at P.A.R.T.S., a dance school known for a highly physical education, Mette Ingvartsen started to consider choreographing as a practice that not only relates to the physical body of the dancer but also to different types non-human performers and animated materials. She even takes away the dancer's body from the scene, and she shifts the hierarchy between the body and the objects in dance. That started with the production Evaporated landscapes (2009), a choreography / performance for foam, fog, light and sound instead of (dancing) bodies.
The Artificial Nature Series
This interest in expansion has resulted in a series of projects that extend choreography to non-human materials. Together they form The Artificial Nature Series, a series of five productions that were created between 2009 and 2012. The Extra Sensorial Garden (2010) was presented in Copenhagen and The Light Forest (2010) could be visited during Szene Salzburg in July 2010 and 2011. In Speculations (2011), the spectator experienced a storytelling session. The Artificial Nature Project (2012) closed the series and reintroduced the human performer into a network of connections between human and non-human actors.
The Red Pieces
Following this series of productions that focused on animated, non-human materials, a return to the human body prompted. This resulted in a new series of productions in which the body, sexuality, nudity, privacy and the way in which they are connected to the public atmosphere are central. Sexuality and the naked body became a means to exploring participation and the collective. In 2014, Mette Ingvartsen, began working on a new cycle titled The Red Pieces. 69 positions (2014) opened that series and questioned the boundaries between private and public space by literally placing the naked body between the theater audience. In the second production, 7 pleasures (2015), she examines seven concepts of pleasure. Twelve performers give shape to sensory sensations. In a long sensual movement, bodies touch each other, lose their limits, vibrate and form unexpected compositions and constellations with things around them. The third production is to come (extended) (2017). It is based on to come (2005), a former work by Mette Ingvartsen for five dancers. The reason for revisiting this choreography with fifteen instead of five dancers in Ingvartsen's desire to refract the current politics of sex through the joyful tone of the production from 2005. The series The Red Pieces also includes 21 pornographies (2017) and The Permeable Stage (2016). The first one is a production that has the presence of pornography in many parts of society as a starting point and explores the operations of the pornographic through a collection of erotic and affective materials. The second one is a meeting of artists and theorists that is focussed on the way in which sexuality is present everywhere, how it transcends the human body, and can be found in the relationships with objects, instruments, environments and media technologies.