Johannes Birringer

Johannes Birringer is an independent media choreographer and artistic director of AlienNation Co., a multimedia ensemble that has collaborated on various site-specific and cross-cultural performance and installation projects since 1993. He lives and works in Houston and London.

Johannes Birringer's artistic training was in theatre and dance; he studied dance-theatre forms that emerged in Germany in the 1970s (Pina Bausch) as well as contemporary dance and movement in the U.S. (with Deborah Hay). After several years of performing, composing his own work in collaboration with dancers, actors, musicians and visual artists, he began to design and direct choreography that included film/video and live acoustic and electronic sound. Increasingly, his performances involve interactive environments and programming of interfaces for real-time performances and installations.

After his first large-scale exhibition-performances in Houston in the late 1980s (Description of a Landscape, Invisible Cities), he founded an ensemble, AlienNation Co.. which has toured internationally and presented work at festivals, theatres, cultural centers and conferences. He has also created an opera (Orpheus and Eurydike, 1992) and a site-specific installation of Wagner's Parsifal, several documentary films and dance videos, and produced public art projects with artists or cultural workers in Houston, Chicago, Havana, Ljubljana, Eisenhüttenstadt, Dresden, and Göttelborn. In the mid 1990s he began directing workshops on performance technologies in many locations of the world. He has received numerous arts grants, awards, and fellowships for his work and the concepts for his intercultural productions, and in the late 1990s was invited to create the new dance and technology Masters Program at The Ohio State University (1999–2003). While teaching at Ohio State University's Dance Department, he created a new MFA in dance-technology and conducted the "Environments Laboratory." In 2003 he founded the Interaktionslabor Göttelborn, Germany, a summer laboratory located in a former coal mine and focused on research in new media performance and interactive systems. He was a Principal Research Fellow in Live Art at the School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University, where he directed a telematic performance lab (LATela) from 2003 to 2006. Since 1998 he has been a Research Fellow with the Anthropology Department at Rice University, Houston.

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