Approach
Katja F.M. Wolf's work integrates dance, theatre, media art and sound experiments in collaborative projects that debate issues of the conditio humana with regard to their performative potential. Her artistic curiosity moves in a broad spectrum reaching from literature and the relation between language and movement to questions of the theory of knowledge and cognitive science. Katja's pieces are both theatrical experimentations and poetic investigations.
Often the audience is immersed as active co-creators of the performative event. Each work therefore significantly turns on space, too, with seating arrangements designed to integrate the audience into the piece. Each spectator is given a perspective entirely their own, still enabling an experience of shared community.
In "ad ultimo" the audience gathers around the edges of a large square mirror. In "Meeting Point 70 - A Movement Report" a live circuit camera invites them into the artist's childhood home co-imagined on stage, so that they find themselves virtually re-enacting the Stasi's intrusion into her life. In "BlackMirrorSolo" the mirror reflects the performer and the audience in a commonly shared space at the same level of being pulled into an illusionary double-3D. In "View from Nowhere" the visitors are asked to lie down in the middle of the performance space between the two opposing rows of seating, to close their eyes and to listen to a radio play after which they continue watching each from the opposite side. In "Black & White Hearing" and in "Revolve" the audience is engulfed by spiraling projection screens. By such developing a different spatial solution for each performance the choreographer aspires to evolve her audience into consciously active partners in the work.
Katja F.M. Wolf uses her theatre work as a tool that she modulates according to each project's needs in order to invite the participants, performers/collaborators and audience alike, to look into the interconnectivity of body and mind in ever new chosen contexts and to play with it as our vehicle to access and navigate within the world. Her poetic and lucid images aim towards rendering the senses receptive to fine shades and differences of tone and colour. In her vivid mises-en-scène the subtly composed combinations of dance, text, images and music co-relate the conditions of our sensual impressions.
Artistic Profile
Already before having passed her A-levels Katja took part in classes and workshops in contemporary dance, improvisation and composition. After two stages for stage design at Munich theaters she started her academic studies 1990 with philosophy at the Munich Ludwig-Maximilians-University. Parallely, she worked in the field of visual arts as well as in her dance theater projects happening in the local free-lance scene. In 1993 she enrolled in a full-time dance and choreography program at the European Dance Development Center, Arnhem, NL, part of the theatre faculty of the Arnhem College of the Arts.
In these five years she developped her own artistic language, got to know and to work with seminal performance artists and body techniques and became infected by video art, music composition and stage and lighting design. In 1998 she graduated from EDDC in Duesseldorf, Germany, and consequently worked as free-lance choreographer, performer and docent, researcher at the intersection of theatre, dance and media arts.
Parallel to her own solo and group work and her contributions as a performer and choreographer to other collaborations she has developed choreographies for city and youth theatres since 2004, several of those awarded by regional and super-regional festivals and art institutions. Her work has been awarded by the City of Duesseldorf Award for the Performing Arts in 2000, in 2003 with a Scholarship of the Art Foundation NRW and in 2009 with the Abroad Fellowship of the federal government of Northrhine-Westfalia which facilitated her work studies in the USA.
Since 2012 a certified healing practitioner specializing in body therapies, she completed her M.A. of dance studies in 2018 at the Free University Berlin with her master thesis researching "Aspects of Healing - Approaches to Art and Therapy in Anna Halprin and Fe Reichelt". In the following year she accompanied the dance theatre piece "drunter und drueber" for a young audience by Canan Erek as dramaturgue and playwright. Since 2021 she applies her broad knowledge in movement and somatic practices in the context of dance- and body psychotherapy and personal development.
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