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-Heather Hansen is a fine artist based in New Orleans, and Paris.

-She is a performative and visual artist known for her kinetic drawing series.

-Heather Hansen graduated from TESC in dance and theatre design.

-Afterwards she then moved to Tokyo to study with dancer Kazuo Ohno, where her aesthetic and philosophy was greatly influenced by the butoh and Gutai art movements; especially in minimalism, using the body as a tool, and holding the same value as product.

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Heather created a piece called 'emptied gestures' where she used her body to create a drawing in charcoal and/or paint.

She would hold these drawing tools in her hands as she moved across the paper and in turn produced artwork so symmetrical and unique.

These drawings are part dance, part performance art, and she uses her body as a drawing tool to create these.

She describes her work by saying, “Emptied Gestures is an experiment in kinetic drawing. In this series I am exploring ways to download my movement directly onto paper, emptying gestures from one form to another. I will usually decide on a general shape and then improvise within a set of self imposed restrictions. I always have some kind of dogma to play with. First of all I’m limited to one plane (so far) but in a way it’s very useful because I am able to find more freedom by having some constraints.”

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(721) Heather Hansen - Emptied Gestures - YouTube

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I personally love the way she creates these art works and with coming up with improvisation tasks I have been very interested in using art to direct where my movement takes me because of a workshop I recently went to ran by choreographer Takeshi Matsumoto. He used art and how we felt in that space to explore, and it inspired me because it was all based on how we felt.

Heather Hansen's work is something I would love to take inspiration from and see what I can create as it has expanded my knowledge on different ways I can generate material.

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When it comes to thinking about what I want to explore choreographically for my piece, my first thought has been to brainstorm opposites as this really interests me, and the idea that jumped out at me was the concept of yin and yang. I also aspire to have my piece be as arty and creative as possible, so when I was researching work of other choreographers and came across Heather Hansen’s symmetrical drawings she formed through dance and using her body as a tool I knew that this is something I wish to explore in depth. I love involving my sense of my body and how I feel in the moment and myself as a choreographer tends to be emotionally driven. I have started forming a vision of creating something deep but contrasting and my next step is to experiment with art and see what I can create. I also like the idea of making a mess that makes sense and involving nature/ a spiritual meaning to my movement. Although I am not sure where my piece is yet to end and how I want it to be specifically, I have already begun becoming excited about where this is heading.

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Be honest about the problems in your piece.

Think about how you might solve the problems.

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What do you have?

How Do you put it together?

How do you make decisions about this?

What are the parts? Can you name them?

Big Piece of Paper

Some pieces of paper

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How you think it went
What you would change looking back
Key moments