Swedish/British choreographer Alexandra Wingate (b.1981) works as a choreographer, performer, dramaturg, producer and as a process facilitator. She lives on the west coast of Sweden in an eco-village and often works in Göteborg, Bergslagen and in Norwegian Sápmi.
As a choreographer she works with performance for stage, dance film, performance installation and participatory performance. She does this as part of a non-hierarchical collective, as the leader of a team and sometimes as a co-creator in someone else’s project.
Wingate is committed to in-depth artistic research and to in-depth collaborations. She values long-term sustainability and often collaborates with the same people. She has ongoing collaborations with dance artists Ina Dokmo, Lena Kimming, Elle Sofe Sara and Liv Schellander. All whom she met while studying dance in London. Beyond that she has often collaborated with composer Cha Blasco, director, light and sound designer Eric Sjögren, visual artist Máret Ánne Sara and artist and director Josefina Björk. She also likes to stay with the same research for a long time producing several different works stemming from the same exploration. Examples of this are Animalarium, The Atlas Club and Kill a Cat Show.
In her early work, developed during her BA and MA studies at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, she was interested in how the cognitive processes of forming emotions and conscious thought relate to the process of choreography and induvidual as well as group improvisation.
Choreographic strategies developed during this period were building systems or mechanisms of behaviour (not form) that by being repeated would create a choreographic structure(s).
Improvisation and score building as the main technique for developing and performing work as well as a strong focus on the co-authorship together with the dancers remains a foundational part of her practice.
A strategy for her more recent work is to use commonly known movement languages. And from that develop a (dance)movement language specific to each work. An example of such a starting point is the “catwalk” walk. Here Wingate is interested in how one can create meaning within a very limited movement material. By creating an improvisation score that processes the material with repetition and small changes in placement and dynamics to manipulate the meaning of the various symbols in the material. It can be completely deconstructed and reduced to abstract details or exist in its full and recognizable form. This allows the dancer to in the moment, via the improvisation score, change and mutate the meaning of the material. Opening it up to say something about the cultural phenomenon the original material was connected to. Example: to use the movement language of the “catwalk” to open a discussion about the performance of femininity, etc. Often Wingate uses the repetitive as a strong presence and as a contrast to the subject’s presence and expression of will. The repetitive mechanical properties of an ”automata”, copy or lifeless object can be irresistibly comic while at the same time evoking a feeling of the eerie. She also has an idea that using a commonly known movement language can, through the audience recognising it, create more connection to the subject matter of the work.
Connected to this is an interest in how culturally conditioned symbols, icons, ideas, ideologies, etc. are internalized and become an invisible part of a human being and of a society. How this can be both experienced as an external pressure put on us and as an invisible internal process. Wingate thinks it is both interesting and important to understand how ”culture” shapes who we are, what we feel and how we express ourselves.
Collecting and working with clothes is a central part of many of Wingate´s works. The aesthetics of the costume, the texture of the material, their associations and personal history are all starting points to compose outfits and movement materials.
Wingate also has experience as a producer, method developer and process facilitator for interdisciplinary, intercultural and community art processes within the framework of her own workshop format Kind of like this, as a part of Ställberg gruva and more recently for Dáiddádallu Sámi Arts Collective in Kautokeino, Norway. Wingate is drawn to this work because she has a great curiosity towards the creative process and how different artists individually or in groups create work. And she deeply enjoys being a part of supporting and creating lasting structures for other artists to explore, produce and present work.
In addition to her work in the art field Wingate has since 2014 worked with children and youth with neuropsychological diagnosis. The motivation to start this work was a basic need to earn money. However, she has stayed with this work as it has become an expansion of her practice. There is a mirroring in the tools used to work with improvisation and performing, in how you have to expand your ability to emphatically “listen” and to discern structures in a wordless space when communicating, playing and supporting people who have a neuropsychological diagnosis.
When not working she likes to “dega” (to be a dough, a Swedish term for seriously and unpurposefully relaxing), listening to podcasts, watching fantasy or science fiction shows or exploring the landscape with the dogs Ilja and Misha.
Alexandra Wingate 