Performances 2009-2026 – AlienNation Co.

Performances 2009 - 2026

The works directed or created by Johannes Birringer between 2009 and 2026 were produced internationally, most often in collaborative constellations with artists in the DAP-Lab (London) and the Interaktionslabor (Göttelborn).

The interactive dance-work Suna no Onna was featured at Laban Center and Watermans in London (2007-08), and the mixed reality installation UKIYO, created with DAP-Lab and guest artists from Japan, toured Eastern Europe in June 2010 and premiered at Sadler’s Wells in November 2010. A prototype of a new dance opera, for the time being/Victory over the Sun, premiered at Watermans International Digital Arts Festival in 2012 (London); the expanded version premiered at Sadler’s Wells in April 2014.

DAP-Lab collaborated on a multi-year research production, METABODY, with 11 other European arts organizations, funded by the EU Culture Program. Installments of DAP-Lab’s new metakimosphere series (2015-2019) have appeared in several venues, the last installments at Queen Mary Drama and Film Theatre in December 2017, and in Durban, South Africa (2018).

After developing a new dance work, Transparent Eclipse, for the ISEA festival in Gwangju, Korea, DAP-Lab’s Mourning for a dead moon premiered in London in December 2019, and subsequently the lab company delved into a series of somatechnics/disability workshops during the covid pandemic, featuring these re-embodiment experiments with and for persons with mixed abilities at international platforms such as Body IQ (Berlin) and ISEA (Barcelona). In 2019 Birringer also conducted an experimental workshop, Underground Spatialities, over several months with anthropologists at Rice University in Houston.

In January 2023 he presented a summary lecture at Rice on his recent film/performance projects addressing the refugee crisis (The River of no one; The Price of Water). In the summer of 2023 he was commissioned to present his outdoor installation BirdSongTree Drawings at the KunstTREFFpunkt festival in Darmstadt. In January 2026 Birringer re-convened members and affiliates of AlienNation Co. to celebrate its more than 30-year history. The company staged the recital „animalinside“ at the Moody Center for the Arts Theatre, Rice University, Houston.

ephemeral edgespace

film and live dance with electronic music:
Johannes Birringer (scenography); Haein Song (dance and film); Claudia Robles Angel (music)

Ephemeral Edgespace is an installation-performance that opens out to am immersive, ritualized, intimate event, ensounding the participants and including audiovisual, tactile and shamanic (mugu) interfaces that draw on particular concepts of multisensorial choreographic architecture, interactional objects, and luminescence. We understand such choreographic architectures as kinetic atmospheres (“kimospheres”) which are not art installations in the traditional sense but participatory scenarios, often built with fabrics and paper, which emphasize sensorial and affective ritualized engagements between dancers, musicians and audience. Ephemeral Edgespace is not a completed work but will be constructed to emerge in the South African local context of ISEA2018, adapted to the particular place we are potentially given to work in. This kimosphere, the sixth in a series that began in 2015, is created in collaboration between choreographer Johannes Birringer, audiovisual artist (including interfacing with biosignals) Claudia Robles-Angel, choreographer and techno-shaman Haein Song (a specialist in Korean ritual kut), and invited South African musicians/percussionists. It attempts to test transcultural edges, inspired by Song’s recent curation of a ritual journey at a Healing Arts festival on the volcanic Jeju Island, locating “ecstatic space” as a bridge between projected (light, video, animation), natural-material and spiritual worlds. [Ephermeral Edgespace, Durban, South Africa, ISEA festival, 2018. Photo © 2018 Birringer]