Johannes Birringer Explained

Johannes Birringer is an independent media choreographer and artistic director of AlienNation Co., a multimedia ensemble that has collaborated on various site-specific and cross-cultural performance and installation projects since 1993. He lives and works in Houston and London.

Biography

Johannes Birringer's artistic training was in theatre and dance; he studied dance-theatre forms that emerged in Germany in the 1970s (Pina Bausch) as well as contemporary dance and movement in the U.S. (with Deborah Hay). After several years of performing, composing his own work in collaboration with dancers, actors, musicians and visual artists, he began to design and direct choreography that included film/video and live acoustic and electronic sound. Increasingly, his performances involve interactive environments and programming of interfaces for real-time performances and installations.

After his first large-scale exhibition-performances in Houston in the late 1980s (Description of a Landscape, Invisible Cities), he founded an ensemble, AlienNation Co.. which has toured internationally and presented work at festivals, theatres, cultural centers and conferences. He has also created an opera (Orpheus and Eurydike, 1992) and a site-specific installation of Wagner's Parsifal, several documentary films and dance videos, and produced public art projects with artists or cultural workers in Houston, Chicago, Havana, Ljubljana, Eisenhüttenstadt, Dresden, and Göttelborn. In the mid 1990s he began directing workshops on performance technologies in many locations of the world. He has received numerous arts grants, awards, and fellowships for his work and the concepts for his intercultural productions, and in the late 1990s was invited to create the new dance and technology Masters Program at The Ohio State University (1999–2003). While teaching at Ohio State University's Dance Department, he created a new MFA in dance-technology and conducted the "Environments Laboratory." In 2003 he founded the Interaktionslabor Göttelborn, Germany, a summer laboratory located in a former coal mine and focused on research in new media performance and interactive systems. He was a Principal Research Fellow in Live Art at the School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University, where he directed a telematic performance lab (LATela) from 2003 to 2006. Since 1998 he has been a Research Fellow with the Anthropology Department at Rice University, Houston.

He has created numerous stage works, video and film installations, and interactive and online collaborative performance work since 1986. He has also published widely on the visual and performing arts, new media and technology.

Since 2006 he has been chair and professor of Performance Technologies at Brunel University, West London, where he created a research group (Design and Performance Lab) dedicated to investigations of wearable technology in cross-over fields of performance, music, design, digital art and fashion. The "DAP-Lab", co-directed by Birringer and Michèle Danjoux, includes artists and researchers, and its production company has produced several new works, Suna no Onna (2007); Ukiyo (2009) - Ukiyo was created in partnership with Japanese artists and began to tour in 2010 - and "for the time being (Victory over the Sun)"(2012-14). A new series of immersive dance installations, 'metakimospheres,' began touring in Europe in 2015-18 as part of a Europe-wide project called METABODY.

Birringer has been contributing editor with PAJ Performing Arts Journal and a contributor to numerous theatre/performance and art journals as well as the newsletter for the Baháʼí Association For the Arts from 1994 (Review: Witnesses of existence - Report on a presentation of art out of Sarajevo in New York City Kunsthalle[1]). Sonja van Kerkhoff created a performance which was reviewed in this newsletter and Birringer contributed an interview responding to the sculpture with some autobiographical responses.[2] He has also been co-editor of the catalogues (Wechselwirkungen', 2004, Spielsysteme, 2006, Manifest der Interaktionskunst, 2014) published by Interaktionslabor, and the editor of Reflexiones sobre Performance, Cultura y Tecnología/ Reflexions on Performance, Culture & Technology.

Works

Publications

Johannes Birringer's books include:

He has co-edited the anthology Tanz im Kopf/Dance and Cognition (2005), published by the German Dance Association (GTF), and Die Welt als virtuelles Environment (2007, TMA Hellerau). He edited (with Josephine Fenger) the 2011 GTF volume Tanz und WahnSinn/Choreomania, and also Tanz der Dinge / Things that Dance, Yearbook of the German Dance Association 2019, vol. 29. Bielfeld: transcript Verlag. His extensive output of articles includes:

External links

Further reading

Notes and References

  1. http://bahai-library.com/bafa/b/birringer.htm Johannes Birringer - dancetheater, movement, new media, video, writing / reviews, U.S.A. / U.K.
  2. http://www.sonjavank.com/change.htm Sonja van Kerkhoff Performances: Savour the Experience and Change is a Law of Nature

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