Leo
Kees

Developed from an ongoing interest in Charles Darwin’s writings on emotional expression, "Darwin on the Spot" explored the relationship between biological inheritance, social behaviour, and cultural identity. Combining choreography, observation, and performative experimentation, the work examined how gestures, reactions, and emotional states emerge at the intersection of instinct and learned behaviour. Rather than illustrating scientific theories, the performance used evolutionary thought as a lens through which to reconsider everyday human interactions and the often invisible patterns that shape them. Humour, physicality, and visual composition created unexpected connections between contemporary life and its evolutionary origins. Together with Anthropomorphia, the work formed part of a broader artistic investigation into how knowledge from outside the arts can be transformed into embodied and artistic experiences.

Created for two performers, Holy Wood explored how film, popular culture, and media imagery influence ideas of beauty, success, gender, and social belonging. Moving between everyday situations and iconic cinematic references, the performance examined the standards embedded in mainstream entertainment. Humour, physical transformation, and visual contrast became tools for exposing the distance between lived experience and idealised representation. Rather than criticising popular culture from the outside, the work embraced its contradictions, pleasures, and absurdities, allowing audiences to recognise themselves within the images being questioned. Positioned between dance, theatre, and visual composition, Holy Wood investigated how collective fantasies shape individual identities and how representation influences the ways people imagine themselves and others.

Commissioned for the opening of the new LWL-Museum for Art and Culture the performance began the moment visitors entered the main hall and encountered a group of nude models surrounded by artists drawing and painting them, accompanied by a large-scale video projection of the act of observation itself. Taking the human body as one of the earliest and most enduring subjects in the history of art, the work explored how meaning is produced through observation, representation, and interpretation. As audiences moved through the museum, a series of choreographed interventions activated relationships between artworks, architecture, performers, and visitors. Positioned between performance, visual arts, and public participation, the project highlighted the unique capacity of live performance to create new encounters with visual art and to foreground the active role of audiences in shaping meaning.

Inspired by Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and influenced by the writings of zoologists Frans de Waal and Desmond Morris, Antropomorfia explored emotional expression through movement research, music, and visual imagery. Moving between anthropological observation and artistic imagination, the performance asked when a gesture becomes believable, what biology might have to do with authenticity, and which behaviours commonly perceived as uniquely human are shared by other mammals. Rather than proposing clear conclusions, it created a space in which audiences could reflect on the fragile boundaries between instinct and culture, nature and performance. Pop-cultural references met physical transformation, humour coexisted with observation, and emotional states became choreographic material. The production marked a significant step in a long-term investigation into how behaviour is embodied, learned, and socially performed.

Developed with three performers whose biographies were shaped by different forms of civic and political engagement, Apocalypse Resistance Training explored how resistance is learned, practiced, and transmitted across generations. Developed for young audiences and drawing on archival material and personal experiences ranging from anti-war demonstrations and environmental activism to life in the former GDR, the performance examined the relationship between individual conviction and collective action. Rather than focusing on political events, it investigated the everyday decisions through which social commitment takes shape and endures over time. Through storytelling, movement, documentary photography, and humour, the work created a dialogue between biographies and larger historical processes.

Developed for the reopening of the Albertinum Museum – Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Adaption extended the research initiated in Antropomorfia by exploring the relationship between human and animal behaviour. The performance placed dancers in direct dialogue with abstract, figurative, and anthropomorphic sculptures, creating a continuous oscillation between bodies perceived as social individuals and bodies perceived as physical matter. Through subtle shifts in speed, focus, weight, and intention, the choreography investigated how highly intimate forms of physical contact could gradually become naturalised and detached from the associations that often accompany human proximity in contemporary culture. At a time when bodily closeness is predominantly represented through sexuality, violence, or family relationships, Adaption proposed alternative forms of tenderness and physical organisation. Bodies merged into collective structures, temporary landscapes, and sculptural compositions, becoming partially abstracted and momentarily released from categories such as gender, culture or identity.

Half fiction, half reality, ‘1984: reimagined’  emerged from a series of playful refusals. Invited by Theater Paderborn to stage Orwell’s dystopian novel, I first refused to reproduce the story as intended—with its characters tortured, defeated, and ultimately crushed by oppression. The second (staged) refusal came from the performers themselves.Halfway through the performance, the performers suddenly step out of their roles, break the fourth wall, and explain to the audience why they are no longer willing to follow Orwell’s story. Instead, they decide to rewrite it. What follows are three personal perspectives on how democracy is experienced in everyday life.Through movement, theatre, sound, and visual imagery, the production examines the tension between fiction and reality, obedience and authorship, and the roles we accept—or refuse—in political life.
The final section uses texts by Brazilian judge and writer Andréa Pachá, once again blurring the boundaries between literary fiction, lived experience, and political reality.

This podcast-performance Combininf lip syci, h umour, interviews, and scientific research, exploring the relationship between biology, marketing, pleasure, and consumption. Starting from the observation that many of the foods we consume daily are carefully engineered to capture and maintain our attention, the show investigated how desire is shaped by evolutionary predispositions, commercial interests, and social environments. Rather than framing food through ideas of guilt, discipline, or healthy living, the work examined the mechanisms through which habits are formed and reinforced. Moving between lecture, theatrical experiment, and private reflection, audiences were invited to reconsider everyday choices that often appear personal but are deeply influenced by larger systems. The result was a playful yet critical exploration of how consumption becomes embodied behaviour.

TRASHedy explored consumption, environmental responsibility, and “ecological intelligence” by moving from the creation of the world and human evolution to the habits of contemporary consumer society. Two performers worked their way through animated images, dance, sound collages, and an ever-growing pile of rubbish, making the consequences of seemingly ordinary decisions physically visible. The performance examined how desires and habits are formed, how personal freedom is entangled with global systems, and why knowledge alone rarely changes behaviour. Rather than offering simple solutions or raising a moralising finger, the work used humour, contradiction, and direct questions to invite audiences to reflect on their own choices.

Designed to travel easily across languages and contexts, TRASHedy transformed a complex ecological and political subject into an accessible, playful, and unsettling theatrical experience.

Most history lessons begin with dates. Das Unsichtbare Haus began several million years earlier—with a single cell making the bold decision not to remain where it was. From there, three performers attempted the modest and barrow task of explaining how life became society: how species travel, settle, adapt, build territories and, eventually, invent borders—only to behave as if migration were a recent development. Some scenes told recognisable stories; others allowed bodies, animated drawings, music and images to think out loud. Figures appeared on screen, escaped into the theatre, dissolved and returned in unexpected forms. Animation was not decoration but a restless fourth actor, carrying the production between documentary clarity, physical storytelling and poetic association.
Its proposition was simple: migration is not an interruption of history. It is one of the ways history happens. Das Unsichtbare Haus won the Main Jury Prize at WESTWIND 2016, NRW’s festival for young audiences.

Created at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Neuquén, Argentina, this dance intervention explored the relationship between choreography, observation, and museum space. Rather than presenting performance as a separate event, the work was a day long intervention  among visitors and artworks, creating temporary dialogues between bodies, architecture, and exhibitions. Developed in collaboration with photographer Roberto Hernández Queijo and students of the Escuela Experimental de Danza Contemporánea de Neuquén, the project investigated how movement can redirect attention and generate new perspectives on familiar spaces. By placing the body in direct conversation with the ushers artworks, the intervention highlighted the active role of observers in producing meaning and transformed the museum into a site of encounter, multiple interpetations, and  mutations perspectives. 

Chalk About explored cultural identity, migration, and belonging through dance, humour, and visual storytelling. Created for mixes aged audiences and Inspired by the experience of growing up between different languages, places, and cultural references, the performance examined how identities are continuously negotiated rather than fixed. Using chalk drawings, movement, and direct interaction with the audience, the work transformed the stage into a temporary map where personal histories intersected with larger social questions. Rather than presenting identity as a stable category, the show highlighted its fluid and evolving nature. Through simple visual imagery and physical storytelling, the performance invited audiences to reflect on difference, common ground, and the many ways people navigate between multiple worlds.
 

The starting point go The Strangers  was investigating the mechanisms through which people construct ideas of identity, difference, and belonging. Combining movement, personal narratives, humour, and theatrical situations, the performance examined how perceptions of "us" and "them" emerge through cultural habits, social expectations, and collective imagination. Rather than focusing on strangers as outsiders, the work revealed how unfamiliarity exists within every social group and even within ourselves. Everyday encounters became starting points for reflecting on prejudice, empathy, curiosity, and fear. Positioned between documentary material and performative fiction, the production invited audiences to question the categories through which they understand others and to reconsider the fragile boundaries that separate familiarity from strangeness.

Spectacular Failures explored the cultural obsession with success by shifting attention toward error, uncertainty, and the productive potential of things going wrong. Combining dance, theatre, music, and visual humour, the performance examined failure not as the opposite of achievement but as an inevitable and often necessary part of learning, experimentation, and transformation. Performers repeatedly attempted, abandoned, reinvented, and reinterpreted actions, exposing the fragile boundary between competence and vulnerability. Rather than celebrating failure uncritically, the work investigated how social expectations shape our understanding of success and how alternative possibilities emerge when certainty disappears. Through humour and physical invention, Spectacular Failures transformed mistakes into a source of creativity, resilience, and collective reflection.

Most history lessons begin with dates. Das Unsichtbare Haus began several million years earlier—with a single cell making the bold decision not to remain where it was. From there, three performers attempted the modest and barrow task of explaining how life became society: how species travel, settle, adapt, build territories and, eventually, invent borders—only to behave as if migration were a recent development. Some scenes told recognisable stories; others allowed bodies, animated drawings, music and images to think out loud. Figures appeared on screen, escaped into the theatre, dissolved and returned in unexpected forms. Animation was not decoration but a restless fourth actor, carrying the production between documentary clarity, physical storytelling and poetic association.
Its proposition was simple: migration is not an interruption of history. It is one of the ways history happens. Das Unsichtbare Haus won the Main Jury Prize at WESTWIND 2016, NRW’s festival for young audiences.