Hannah Sampé
Hannah Sampé is a dance artist and researcher currently based in Cologne. She works at the margins of contemporary dance, performance, writing and community activism. Hannah works as a choreographer developing her own projects, as a dance disseminator working in and developing various formats of dance dissemination and as a dancer/performer in her own or other people's work.
The questions Hannah poses often circulate around the topics of care, conviviality, and queering relationships. Their work is to reconcile aspects of her experience as a political activist in the field of De-growth politics and Anti-Ableism with the language of dance and performance.
After completing their studies in Liberal Arts and Sciences at University College Maastricht (NL) with a focus in Political Philosophy, Sociology and Cultural Studies, Hannah studied dance and dance dissemination at the Centre for Contemporary Dance in Cologne (DE). They also continued her dance education at Intensive Dance Aacademy Maastricht (NL), TICTAC Art Centre in Brussels (BE) and Suzanne Dellal in Tel Aviv (IS).
In their first years as a free-lance artist in the field of dance and performace Hannah has been fortunate to collaborate with a range of inspiring artist whose work poses challenging questions to the norms of relating in society today, such as Doris Uhlich, Sebastian Blasius, NOT FABULOUS, David Zambrano and Jeremy Wade.
In 2019 Hannah received the NRW Nachwuchs Stipendium Freie Kinder und Jugendtheater and is in the season 2020/2021 artist in residence at the TANZFAKTUR Cologne together with Hannah Krebs and Philipp Hansen for a collective research on 'Finding Spaces for Care'.
Choreography
Choreography is the art of world making.
It is the art of navigating people’s attention through a space to shift perspective on that what was over-looked, neglected or ill-represented before. The art of creating a space, in which the rules of language and understanding are tested and re-invented- spaces, where bodies find new relevance.
To me the stage is a space for meeting, for addressing, for uncovering and for re-imagening.
I aim to address what seems urgent, try to give space to what does not have space usually (and bodies and thoughts that are usually unseen) and create worlds of meaning that help as a survival strategy for the complicated now.
My work is strongly informed by the fields of somatic practice, feminist performance and on- stage improvisation.
In my work I try to explore new meeting points between the people on stage and the audience. Or rather between people. I often wonder about codes of understanding and readability and how they create inclusion or exclusion and how they body can help to bridge them.
I also wonder how these categories of inclusion and exclusion apply to the language of contemporary dance and how we can go beyond them by finding spaces of intimacy, vulnerability, liberated bodily expression and a plurality of discourse and understanding.
Performance
Performance to me is the transmission of energy. It is an act of intimacy and mediating.
It is about sharing one's lived experience in the present moement, using the speech of the body.
As a performer it is my ever-lasting task to work on letting things pass through me. To become a medium to sound, movement, space and emotions.
My dance is strongly influenced by the practice of different kinds of somatic work, especially the principle of Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, BMC and Ideokinesis. Leading these practices into movement and improvisation gives the body and the mind endless opportunities to create new pathways and work towards a more permeable and empathetic bodymind.
Another important practice for my dance are the principles of Flying Low and Passing Through, developed by David Zambrano.
As well as the practice of Instant Composition and live Performance.
(Dance) Dissemination
I understand dance dissemination as a tool or a perspective that I like to take into my own artistic work, into situations of teaching, research or creation
.
Very simply speaking, it means looking on how information is passed on between bodies, between people and how this is affected by different factors, such as our physical, personal and cultural background, the situational context, the atmosphere, the energy in thespace etc..
It is an interest in trying to understand the complexity that happens when different identities and realities meet in a space.
As a dance disseminator I am especially interested in increasing my awareness and sensitivity towards how the tools of dance and performance can be applied to create situations of sharing, healing, empowerment, transmission and communication.
To make tangible the ways in which we relate to each other and to shake them up at times.