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Leo
Kees

MUSEUMS 


Inauguration Performance at LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur

How does the body shape our relationship to art, history, and cultural memory?

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.

CREDITS 

Performed by: Cornelia Kupferschmid, Jan Sturmius Becker, Juan Branca | Idea & Direction: Leo Kees. Chorephgraphy Leo Kees in Collaboration with the Team | Dramaturgy: Heike Kortenkamp | Composition & Sound design: Ralf Haarmann | Lighting design: Johannes Sundrup | Theater, cultural and art education: Johanna Kösters-Eenkhoorn, Heike Kortenkamp, Verena Kuhlmann | Assistant director: Janine Ahmann | Photo and video documentation: Johann Edelmann | Management: Rut Profe-Bracht, Judith Heese | produced by Performancekollektiv Fetter Fisch under the artistic Direction by Cornelia Kupferschmid,  in cooperation with LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur Münster and the programme Kulturagenten für kreative Schulen in Münster.

* for further infomration see Archive 

Adaption at Albertinum - Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden 

How can choreography temporarily release bodies from normative social behaviour? 

 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.

CREDITS 

Performed by: Juan Manuel Branca, João Fernando Cabral, Leo Kees, Julia Mota Carvalho, Marcela Ruiz Quintero | Concept & Direction: Leo Kees | Dramaturgy: Carmen Mehnert | Music: Johannes Schmidt | produced by Das Semperoper Ballett, Palucca Hochschule für Tanz Dresden and HELLERAU / Sabine Stenzel Tanzplan Deutschland

* for further infomration see Archive 

Intervention at MNBA, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes 

How does the presence of a living body change the way we experience visual art?

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. 

CREDITS 

Performed by: Students of the Escuela Experimental de Danza Contemporánea de Neuquén | Direction: Leo Kees | Photography collaboration: Roberto Hernández Queijo  | Assitant: Amy Lilén Lees | produced by Leo Kees in collaboration with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Neuquén and Escuela Experimental de Danza Contemporánea de Neuquén.

* for further infomration see Archive 

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