Jenni Louwén is a choreographer and dancer from Gothenburg, coming to Vitlycke for a development residency with her new work “Through Fractured Mirrors”.

As one of this year’s artists in “Next Move”, in collaboration with Stora Teatern/Göteborgs Dans- och Teaterfestival, Jenni is currently in a research and development phase with the work. Her practice explores the meeting between contemporary and street dance, and how different movement languages can influence and transform each other.

During the residency, Jenni will bring dancers into the process and use the studio as a space for experimentation and further research. She will work with different scenic worlds, forms and freestyle, while sharing ideas and ways of working she has been exploring through her own research. By testing these ideas through different bodies, she wants to explore what works, what changes and what new things can emerge.

The residency will be an opportunity to continue developing the work through practice, test ideas in the studio and discover new possibilities and directions for “Through Fractured Mirrors”.

In her own words regarding the performance:
“The piece “Through Fractured Mirrors” is a dance piece that invites the audience into an encounter between movement, memory, and humanity. The work is based on true stories from the dancers themselves – personal experiences that, through dance and choreography, take on new form, new light, and new meaning. I want to create a performance that shows how art can be a way to understand, process, and transform life’s fragments into something beautiful and meaningful."

About the artist
Jenni Louwen is a dancer, choreographer and teacher based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Throughout her dance career, she has moved between many different forms of dance and ways of working, from artistic productions and contemporary dance to commercial work, battles, freestyle and improvisation-based performances. Moving between different genres and contexts has always been a natural part of her journey, and has shaped the way she approaches movement today. Rather than seeing dance through separate styles, she is interested in what happens when different movement languages meet, influence each other and become part of the same practice.

She is drawn to how different movements feel in the body and how they can shift between softness, groove, precision, power and dynamics. Popping has become an important part of her movement language, while contemporary dance has opened up an interest in fluidity, floorwork and different ways of working with the body. Music, images, imagination and feeling are important parts of her creative process. She is especially interested in the moments when she can stop thinking about how she moves and simply be in what she is doing.

As a choreographer, Jenni wants to create work that feels honest, beautiful and hypnotic. She is interested in creating strong visual worlds through movement, and in how something can feel familiar and human while also becoming something unexpected.

She is interested in how her choreographic material and different movement methods meet dancers with different bodies, backgrounds and experiences. How to to create a coherent work where the dancers still feel that their individuality has a place within the material. Her process is based on sharing: bringing her own ideas and movement material into the room, seeing how the dancers receive and interpret them, and allowing that exchange to shape the work as it develops. She is interested in creating something that feels meaningful for everyone involved in the process.

Jenni is driven by a constant curiosity about dance and a desire to keep developing her own movement language while discovering new ways of creating with others.