Biography

Alexandra Wingate is a Swedish/British choreographer working as a choreographer, performer, dramaturg, producer, and process facilitator. She is based on the west coast of Sweden, where she lives in an eco-village, and her work often takes place in Göteborg, Bergslagen, and Norwegian Sápmi.

Her choreographic practice spans stage performance, dance film, performance installation, and participatory formats. Wingate works both within non-hierarchical collectives, as the leader of artistic teams, and as a co-creator within other artists’ projects. Long-term collaboration and sustainability are central values in her work, and she frequently returns to the same collaborators over extended periods. Ongoing artistic partnerships include collaborations with dance artists Ina Dokmo, Lena Kimming, and Liv Schellander, as well as recurring work with composer Cha Blasco, director and light and sound designer Eric Sjögren, and artist and director Josefina Björk. 

A significant strand of Wingate’s practice is her role as co-choreographer, working closely with choreographers and artistic directors to realise their artistic visions. This includes long-term collaborations with choreographer Elle Sofe Sara and visual artist Máret Ánne Sara.

Wingate often remains with a single artistic inquiry over time, allowing it to generate multiple works. Examples of such long-term research projects include Animalarium, The Atlas Club, and Kill a Cat Show.

Wingate’s early choreographic work, developed during her BA and MA studies at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, focused on how the cognitive processes of forming emotions and conscious thought relate to the process of individual as well as group improvisation. And how to develop methods for choreographing for group improvisation. During this period, she developed choreographic strategies based on systems and behavioural mechanisms rather than aesthetic form. These systems, through repetition, created the structure of the choreographic structure(s) of the work.

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.

In recent years, Wingate has, together with Liv Schellander, developed Choreo-Constellating within the framework of Animalarium. Choreo-Constellating is an emergent artistic practice developed in close collaboration with peers, combining choreography, improvisation, systemic inquiry, and constellation work into an embodied methodology for collective storytelling and sense-making. Recent works such as Shows for Futures explore interdependence and climate emergency through site-responsive performances grounded in local histories and ecologies.

A recurring strategy in Wingate’s choreographic work—visible in projects such as Kill a Cat Show, early Animalarium works, and Rapacious Excellence—is the use of widely recognisable movement languages as a starting point to investigating how meaning can be created using highly limited movement vocabulary. From these, she develops movement languages specific to each work. One example is in Kill a Cat Show where the use of the “catwalk” walk. Through improvisation scores that employ repetition and subtle shifts in dynamics and placement, the material can be deconstructed into abstraction or remain fully recognisable. This allows performers to continuously shift and renegotiate meaning in performance, opening the material toward broader reflections on cultural phenomena such as, in the case with Kill a Cat Show, the performance of femininity.

Repetition plays an important role in this work, often functioning as a contrast to individual agency and expression of will. The mechanical and automaton-like qualities of repetitive movement can be simultaneously comic and unsettling, evoking both familiarity and unease. Wingate is also interested in how the use of culturally recognisable movement can create a stronger connection between audience and subject matter, as recognition becomes an entry point into more complex questions.

Closely connected to this is Wingate’s interest in how culturally conditioned symbols, icons, and ideologies are internalised and become invisible forces shaping both individuals and societies. She explores how these processes can be experienced simultaneously as external pressure and internalised structures, and considers it crucial to understand how culture influences who we are, what we feel, and how we express ourselves.

Costume and clothing are central elements in many of Wingate’s works. The aesthetics, textures, associations, and personal histories embedded in garments often serve as starting points for character creation and the development of movement material.

In addition to her artistic practice, Wingate has extensive experience as a producer, method developer, and process facilitator within interdisciplinary, intercultural, and community-based art contexts. She has led and developed projects through her own workshop format Kind of like this, as a part of Ställberg gruva, and more recently with Dáiddádallu Sámi Arts Collective in Kautokeino, Norway. She is drawn to this work through a deep curiosity about artistic processes and a strong commitment to supporting sustainable structures for artists to research, produce, and present work.

Since 2014, Wingate has also worked with children and young people with neuropsychological diagnoses. While initially motivated by economic necessity, this work has become an important extension of her artistic practice. She recognises strong parallels between the tools used in improvisation and performance and the skills required in this context, particularly the capacity for attentive, empathetic listening and for recognising structures within non-verbal communication.