Johannes Birringer
Chair in Drama & Performance Technologies. Research Co-ordinator
Brunel University
Uxbridge
UB8 3PH
United Kingdom
Summary
Johannes Birringer 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. He is a choreographer and media artist, and artistic director of AlienNation Co., a Houston-based multimedia ensemble that has collaborated on numerous site-specific and cross-cultural performance and installation projects since 1993. After directing international workshops on dance and technology in England, Germany, and the U.S., he was appointed head of the new dance and technology program at The Ohio State University (1999-2003) where he developed the new MFA curriculum in dance technologies and conducted research programs in his "Environments Lab." In 2003 he was appointed Principal Research Fellow in Live Art and Performance at Nottingham Trent University. In late 2005 he convened the Digital Cultures Lab, a cross-cultural dance and technology workshop-festiva, and 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.
His exhibition-performances and digital films have been staged in Europe, the U.S., Latin America, China and Japan. He has received numerous arts grants, awards, and fellowships for his work including a NEA/Rockefeller artists project grant in 1993. More recently, his directing projects included multi-media play Sueno, the interactive dance work Suna no Onna (London 2007-08), the digital oratorio Corpo, Carne e Espirito (Brasil 2008), and UKIYO [Moveable Worlds] (2009-2010), a choreographic installation created with artists from DAP-Lab and Tokyo/Japan.
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.
Research and Teaching
Research Overview
">Johannes’s research activities include choreography and digital media, design and interactive technologies, theatre scenography, video, music and installation art, performance theory and its relations to current research in life sciences and cognitive sciences, cross-cultural collaboration.The DAP-Lab, which he has directed since 2005, explores convergences between physical movement choreography, visual expression in dance/film/fashion, wearable design, and real-time interactive data flow environments. Participants explore the relations between design in motion, and design fabrics and performance wearables within a performance context with digital projections allowing the clothes with built-in sensors to be used for performance interaction with camera tracking and real-time data transformation (video, sound, motion graphics,). DAP-Lab involves researchers at Brunel University conjoined with telematic partner sites in the USA, Japan, Brazil and Italy, and develops prototypes of wearable garments which respond in distinct ways to body movement, camera capture, and sensory processing. Most recently, research has focused on audiophonic wearables and sonic visualization in performance. Birringer is a co-founder of ADAPT and has been working in online collaboration with live performer from multiple sites since 2001. The performance ensemble of the Lab has created online performances and large-scale dance installations.
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 (1989), Media and Performance: along the border (1998); Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture (2000 and 2005), and "> Performance, Technology, and Science (2008).
In 2005 he co-edited Tanz im Kopf/Dance and Cognition, an anthology of new research in dance and neuroscience; and in 2011 he also co-edited Tanz und WahnSinn/Dance and ChoreoMania, an anthology on dance and madness.
