Catalina Insignares

Catalina Insignares is a Colombian choreographer and dancer based in Paris. She studied dance in Canada and France, and completed a Master’s degree in Choreography and Performance at the University of Giessen, Germany. Her pieces question the systems of artistic production and their relationship to society. She seeks the moment when dance generates unintelligible, whatever-like subjectivities and collectives. She works always in collaboration and long term associations (Caroline Creutzburg, Miriam Schulte, Else Tunemyr, Zuzana Zabkova, Gretchen Blegen) for choreography, dramaturgy, teaching and performance.

Her practice includes a duet danced with a participant over a few weeks (us as a useless duet) (in Giessen, Frankfurt, Bogota), a night reading addressed to sleeping bodies (useless land) (performed in Brussels Precarious Pavilions, Beursshouwburg; Berlin Klosterruine and MärzMusik; Paris Ferme du Buission; among others), and sensory practices that listen to the connections we have with the dead (ese muerto se lo cargo yo).

Since 2014, she collaborates with Carolina Mendonça, maintaining a very close complicity in different manners of working together. Reading groups, telepathic dances, psychic vision sessions, caresses and massages populate these encounters.

Since 2017, she has been working with Myriam Lefkowitz as a performer and also in a collaboration that seeks to infiltrate sensory practices from the social and political realities of exiled people (La facultad). diverse social contexts (la facultad). Since 2019, Catalina has been developing a research project at DAS THIRD in Amsterdam and she is a co-curator at the Gessnerallee in Zurich.

Practice Statement
I am interested in how the tools of dance can become dispositives that direct our attention to new (old) ways of listening and to let oneself be moved by winds, ancestors or electro-magnetic fields.

A reading for sleeping bodies, a hand dance sent to an absent person, a landscape of objects and materials that is composed on lying bodies, a reading of a text accompanied by touch, a practice that addresses the heart as the main vector of connection ...

My practice mixes somatic, choreographic or energetic practices, sometimes influenced by tarot reading, hypnosis or telepathy - so many mediums that I deploy to experiment with other forms of relationship to oneself, to others and to our social environment.

Through these sensory experiences, we can invent together ways of communicating through the body, imagination and memory - ways that are not dependent on language and that can be invented with our differences - not against them, not without them, with them.

The ground of the work is found in workshops and seminars and moments in which we can feel and think together with others. Reading groups, telepathic dances, psychic vision sessions, caresses and massages populate these encounters. The body and the extra-sensory have become the central tools to ask questions to the world.