Laura Hicks

Otto Akkanen

LAURA HICKS (she/they) is a queer feminist Canadian artist from Tkaronto (known as Toronto). Working as a choreographer, performer, and educator in the Frankfurt am Main area since 2013, she creates choreographic work for the stage, while also teaching in different contexts. Her interest is in sensory states, qualities and intensities explored through improvisation.

Awarded the Holy Body Tattoo’s ‘BC Emerging Artist of the Year’ in 2009, she presents her choreography internationally and continues to develop projects with other artists. Creating several works as part of the duo Hicks&Bühler, she produced, directed, and performed in the remount of Der Klumpen (2018) which was awarded the #TakeHeart Wiederaufnahme and NPN funding in 2022. A work for 5 women moving in close intense physical contact was remounted for the Tanzfestival Rhein-Main 2022, while Hicks&Bühler’s work Strange Loops (2019) was a co-production with Künstlerhaus Mousonturm and the Hessisches Stattsballet for Tanzfestival Rhein-Main 2019. She also collaborates with Ilana Reynolds producing Making Impressions and Other Failures, (2018) which was selected for HTT21 has toured internationally.

As a choreographer she has worked for Schauspiel Frankfurt, LIGNA, Compagnie des Corps Parlants (Marseille), and as a performer for Glokowski/Hoesch (Frankfurt/Dusseldorf), Kovács/O’Doherty (Berlin), Davis Freeman/Random Scream (Brussels) and as a dramaturg for FLUX e.V for the Shared Spaces Festival (Mannheim). She holds an MA in Contemporary Dance Education from HfMDK where she has also been an adjunct lecturer since 2014, and a BA in International Development Studies and Comparative Politics (McGIll 2004).

Otto Akkanen

Overarching praxis statement:

I never enter the process of making a work knowing where it will end up. The process of moving through the steps of research, construction, and fine tuning of a work, hopefully always leads one into unknown territory. I make work from a strong drive and desire for cultural critique and questioning of the limitations of accepted norms and the exciting and interesting process of revealing something new about an idea by bringing together different layers of questioning contained within the experience of physicality, choices about the use of time and space, relationships between bodies, staging, dramaturgy, and relation to the audience. Live performances allow for the existence and production of new knowledges that couldn’t otherwise be articulated. Additionally, I value the quality of liveness, transparency, intimacy, unpredictability, and humour,  that comes from working with improvisation.

Otto Akkanen

Current art and/or research interest:

Sparked by sociopolitical content, and driven by themes that speak on the level of sociocultural critique or reflection, I am interested in constructing movement scenes that provoke an experience or taste of something outside of accepted social norms, cultural assumptions and concepts. Dealing with themes drawn from sociology, philosophy, or daily life, my work explores dance as a physical language of the body that carries the meaning of an experience within it.

My work has dealt with the experience of collective collaboration and individuation (Der Klumpen), failure as related to interconnectedness (Making Impressions and Other Failures), perceptions of time and duration as relating to freedom and the collective event (Gut Symmetries), and places of belonging in social space and contact (Dritter Raum). Often working with female performers, I am also very interested in how gender is portrayed outside of normative and patriarchical constructs, often intentionally choosing to create intimately physical but non-sexualized and nonbinary encounters between performers. My current work researches movement that its self could be considered non binary, or not fitting into known categories of human/thing/animal/male/female.

More information:
www.laurahicks.net

http://instagram.com/laurahicks_projects
http://vimeo.com/laurahicks