Dorte Bjerre Jensen (Frederiksberg, Denmark): I TURN MYSELF TO FACE ME

  • 19 Dec 2021 1pm UTC
  • dur 2 min

“I still don’t know what I was looking for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets
Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I’ve never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I’m much too fast to take that test
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
“Turn and face the stranger” (David Bowie, Changes)

The poetic video is the act of facing the stranger within ourselves through the other! What if the person that is facing you is the idea of a mirror as a heterotopia? Heterotopia is a concept elaborated by philosopher Michel Foucault to describe certain cultural, institutional, and discursive spaces that are somehow ‘other’: disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory, or transforming. Heterotopias are worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside. Allow yourself to stand face to face with another person as if it was a mirror, as this unreal place where the other person is you, where you are experiencing yourself through another person.

BIO: “My art is my activism and my teaching, my teaching is my art and my activism, and I want to keep it moving”. My work is a hybrid between dance, choreography, healing rituals and visual art and is anchored by a persistent and evolving inquiry into negotiation, relation, attention and movement in all of its senses – social, experimental, political, and aesthetic. As an artist I create, direct, and perform, locating my practice beyond commodification as a critical and empowering practice. I hold an M.F.A. from the Danish National School of Performing Arts (the dance department). Currently I am an artist and researcher at Aarhus University, IMC (Interacting Minds Centre) with the art/science collaboration Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER), a project between Aarhus University and Olafur Eliasson Studio, Berlin. With EER I am developing Performative scores, exploring how performance art practices may be merged with scientific inquiries to study and prompt reflection upon notions of togetherness, bodily connections to space, collaboration and knowledge transmission. With my work Performative Scores I investigate how scoring as performance art holds a capacity to redefine and craft sensory and transformative journeys that articulate novel forms of aesthetic embodied attention, with an emphasis on interconnectivity, that transform the public space into an artwork. My work has been performed at The Tate Modern London, Trapholt, DOKK1, The Lab Station Copenhagen,, Copenhagen University department of Arts and Cultural Studies and Studio Olafur Eliasson, Thorvaldsens ARTWEEK. I have been researching, practicing and performing the post-modern dance form contacting improvisation for more than 20 years and is deeply interested in its bodily movement capacity and expression, as an art form both in practice and in theory. Additionally, I am a Hatha Yoga teacher, Rosen Method therapist, and Conscious Touch therapist. My publications include “Facilitating Thinking-Touch through Process Philosophy and Contact Improvisation” Thinking Touch in Partnering and Contact Improvisation: philosophy, pedagogy, practice, Editor Malaika Sarco-Thomas: Cambridge Scholar Press 2020. “Kontaktimprovisation.” ”Dans og Kamp” Dans 22. Bevægelse. Koreografi. Performance. Editor Mie Lykke Nielsen: Frydenlund, 2018. And online publications. ARTIST’S WEBSITE