Johannes Birringer is artistic director of AlienNation Co., a Houston-based multimedia ensemble that has collaborated on various site-specific and cross-cultural performance and installation projects since 1993. After directing international workshops on dance and technology in England, Germany, and the US., he was appointed head of the new dance and technology program at The Ohio State University (1999-2003). He developed the new MFA curriculum in dance technologies, initiated the IPS (Interactive Performance Series), and conducted research programs in his "Environments Lab." Since 2003 he has worked more frequently in Europe, and was Principal Research Fellow in Live Art and Performance at Nottingham Trent University. He joined Brunel University's School of Arts in early 2006. He is director of the DAP-Lab and Acting Director of the newly created Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance.
Apart from choreographic and digital projects, he has worked as curator, conference organiser workshop director and consultant. He has served in numerous editorial positions and local, national, and international boards and committees, including IDAT (Board of Directors, International Dance and Technology Organization), the National Dance Association (Dance Science and Somatics/Technologies committee), and The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) - Arts-Archive Workgroup. Recently, he contributed to RePerCute (Latin American Program on Digital Cultures, UCLA Hypermedia Studio, Los Angeles), and taught the first course in dance technology at the Beijing Dance Academy in China. He is now particularly interested in developing new research on "digital cultures" and network/design theory. At the end of 2005 he convened the Digital Cultures Lab, a cross-cultural dance and technology workshop-festival held at Nottingham, UK.
His early large-scale exhibition-performances were staged in Texas in the 1980s; in 1992 he choreographed a new opera, Orpheus and Eurydike (Chicago), and throughout the 90s created dance-theatre, multimedia and public art projects based on collaborations between performers, musicians, visual artists and cultural workers in the U.S., Eastern Europe, and Latin America. His ensemble has toured internationally and presented work at festivals, theatres, schools, cultural centers and conferences. He has received numerous arts grants, awards, and fellowships for his work including a NEA/Rockefeller artists project grant in 1993. More recently, he directed a new interactive multi-media play, Sueno (2003), written and performed by Angeles Romero; his interactive exhibition East by West was shown at the Festspielhaus Hellerau (Dresden) and the DEAF03 Festival in Rotterdam (2003), and he received further commissions in 2004 and 2005 to create interactive artworks. In the summer of 2005 he staged "Cançoes dos Olhos", a cycle of intermedia songs, created with composer Paulo C. Chagas and dancer Veronica Endo. In the fall of 2005 he exhibited the "Emergent dress" film installation, a project created with fashion designer Michèle Danjoux, members of the DAP Lab and telematic partners in Arizona and Rome. Current dirtecting projects include the interactive dance work Suna no Onna (London 2007-08) and the newly commissioned digital oratorio Cuerpo Palomilla (Brasil 2008).
Birringer received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Trier University (Germany) after graduate research fellowships at Cambridge and Yale Universities. He has taught performance studies at Yale University, UT-Dallas, Rice University, Northwestern University, and at the Giessen Institute of Applied Theatre Science. He has published widely on the visual and performing arts and is a contributing editor with Performing Arts Journal (USA), Performance Research (UK), South African Theatre Journal (SA), PADM (UK) and BST (UK). His books include Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism (1991), Media and Performance: along the border (1998); Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture (2000 and 2005), and Performance, Technology, and Science (forthcoming, 2008). In 2005 he co-edited Tanz im Kopf / Dance and Cognition, an anthology of new research in dance and science; he is now writing, with Angeles Romero, a critical manual on video and theatre, and a new book on interactive dreaming.
In 2003 he founded the Interaktionslabor Goettelborn in a former Coal Mine in the Saarland, Germany. The Interaktionslabor is an annual international workshop dedicated to research, performance and software application development in interactive and networked media technologies.
Company website: http://www.aliennationcompany.com
Books and other Publications (selected)
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Current Performance projects (2005-2007)
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