Mette Ingvartsen

The Danish dancer and choreographer Mette Ingvartsen graduated from PARTS in 2014 and has since been a regular guest at Kaaitheater. She is our artist-in-residence from 2013 to 2016. She regards Brussels as her base, her structure Great Investment has its offices at Kaaitheater. 

Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish choreographer and dancer. From 1999 she studied in Amsterdam and Brussels where she graduated from the performing arts school PARTS in 2004. Her first performance Manual Focus (2003) was made while she was still studying. Since then she has initiated several research projects and made numerous performances, among others 50/50 (2004), to come (2005), Why We Love Action (2006), It’s in The Air (2008) GIANT CITY (2009) and All the way out there... (2011).

Questions of kinaesthesia, perception, affect and sensation have been crucial to most of her work. Recently her interest has turned towards thinking choreography as an extended practice. Starting with evaporated landscapes in 2009, a performance for foam, fog, light and sound which she also presented at the Kaaistudios during Burning Ice #2, this interest has led to a series of propositions that extend choreography into non-human materials. In 2010 she worked on several site-specific propositions, also dealing with notions of artificial nature including The Extra Sensorial Garden and The Light Forest (2010 and 2011). Her group work The Artificial Nature Project (2012) reintroduced the human performer into a network of connections between human and non-human actors, and concluded the series on artificial nature.
In 2014 she started a new cycle of work entitled The Red Pieces. 69 Positions opened this series and questioned the borders between private and public space, by literally placing the naked body in the middle of the theatre audience. In the second piece, 7 Pleasures, a group of 12 performers confronted notions of nudity, body politics and sexual practice.

Mette Ingvartsen is artist in residence at Kaaitheater from 2013 until 2016 where she has presented her work since 2004. She is also associated artist to the APAP network. From 2017 to 2022 she will be part of the artistic team at Volksbühne in Berlin, under the direction of Chris Dercon.

Besides her performance work Mette Ingvartsen is engaged in research. Her practice involves writing, making, performing and documenting work. She teaches and gives workshops often related to developing methodologies within choreographic practices. Since 2005 she has been working on everybodys, an open ongoing collaborative project based on open source strategies, aiming at producing tools and games that can be used by artists to develop work. She worked as an editor for everybodys publications from 2005 till 2010.
In 2008 she participated in 6Months1Location initiated by Xavier Le Roy and Bojana Cvejic, a project experimenting with education, structures of production and artistic exchange. During the 6 months she worked on the YouTube project Where is my Privacy, infiltrating and utilizing contemporary communication tools as a way to rethink choreographic production. As an extension of 6M1L she took part in organising the festival Inpresentable 09 in Madrid, on an invitation by Juan Dominguez.
Mette Ingvartsen is finishing a PhD in choreography at UNIARTS in Sweden. In this context she is researching the relationship between artist writing and artistic practice, using her own work and writing as a way to experiment with these relations.

Mette Ingvartsen has worked as a performer in projects of Jan Ritsema / Bojana Cvejic, Xavier Le Roy and Boris Charmatz.