Heike Langsdorf
Heike Langsdorf (1974, Burghausen) lives and works in Brussels. She studied Contemporary Dance at the Conservatory Arnhem (NL), (today: ArtEZ) and the postmaster-program Advanced Performance Training (a.pass) at Antwerp. She worked for and with various theatre makers, choreographers, visuals artists and architects. Between 2000 and 2012 she formed, together with Christophe Meierhans and Christoph Ragg, the collective C&H. Their performative (frame)works explored the conditions for action inside and outside the theatre- and art-context. Since 2010 she produces artistic work with radical_hope, a platform for artistic researche/s and cocreation/s. Langsdorf’s functions are hereby alternating between maker, performer, curator, artistic researcher and pedagoge.
Langsdorf works since 2013 at KASK school of arts HOGENT as a teacher, mentor, coordinator and since 2016 researcher. From 2016 until 2019 she was running @KASK the research-project Distraction as Discipline in association with Anna Luyten and in this context closely collaborating with artists / scholars Alex Arteaga, Tawny Andersen, Julien Bruneau, Anouk Llaurens, Irene Lehmann, Miriam Rohde & Laetitia Gendre.
Throughout the years Langsdorf worked and works in dialogue with dramaturges, editors and producers such as Sébastien Hendrickx (2012−14), Jeroen Peeters (2014÷15), Kristof Van Baarle (2016÷17), Elowise Vandenbroecke (2017÷19), Fransien van de Putt (2020-) and Simone Basani (2020-).
Parallel to making artistic work — pieces for stage, interventions, collaborative processes — Heike Langsdorf has always been developing a discursive practice, which ranges from co-organising conferences and symposia and publishing occasionally (on commission). Together with Alex Arteaga she co-edited the book series Choreography as Conditioning (2021), exploring the notions of choreography, understood as ways of organising subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning, in both art-making and society-making.
Her various foci lead her to initiating the long term project radical_house in 2019, which she currently co-runs and co-curates together with Simone Basani and Alice Ciresola. They are supported in their work by a long-standing network of collaborators (artistic, practitioners and organizations).
* picture by French & Mottershead (2010)