Inclusive Dance Company

To engage choreographically to me means to be attentive to and listen into human and non-human movement in the world. I understand choreography as a way of spatializing new places in artistic ways, acting in and engaging with the world.

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Choreography makes space for saying something about and taking part in creating a world in constant movement. Choreography creates a specific choreographic time, a kind of ecological time experience characterised by high presence and entanglement with all and everything involved.

 

I experience a choreographic process as a process of relating, (re)searching, listening, exploring, opening up for impulses, critically inquiring, engaging with, challenging and creating artistic form in a way that somehow involves movement.

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I co-founded Inclusive Dance Company in 2000 with an ambition to explore, create, challenge and take part in re-doing and re-thinking choreographic processes, with a special focus on stretching normative ideas about dance, dancers, places and structures for art. This interest led me to a practice-led doctoral project at the Theatre Academy (now University of the Arts) in Helsinki in 2003-09 (Østern, 2009). From 2015 I am Professor in Arts Education with a focus on Dance at NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and from 2020 Visiting Professor in Dance Education in Contemporary Contexts at Stockholm University of the Arts. I am active as artist/researcher/artist with a special interest in socially engaged art, and engage in public debate about society, arts, education and politics through activism, discussions and writings.

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In Inclusive Dance Company I have had the role of being the choreographic impulse-giver and leader, suggesting ideas to be jointly and collaboratively explored in artistic ways, as well as being main responsible for the company's productions.

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