Patricia Kuypers is a dancer, improviser, dance researcher.
After studying psychology at university, where a meeting with psychoanalyst Jacques Schotte, a thought improvisor, encouraged her to follow her passion, she turned to dance. She trained herself while working as a critic for the daily and specialist press, which enabled her to discover a large number of shows free of charge at avant-garde festivals.
A decisive encounter with Steve Paxton, in the mid-80s, led her to turn her gaze to action, launching herself into choreographic creation while founding Contredanse association in Brussels, a supporting space for the development of contemporary dance.
Driven by the need to deepen her reflection on artistic practice and share it with others, she and the Contredanse team then embarked on the adventure of publishing Nouvelles de danse, for which she remained artistic advisor until 2004. Combining practice and theory, inviting artists and publishing or translating their writings, she works to broaden knowledge of dance thinking and make it accessible to as many people as possible.
In the field of writing for and about movement, Patricia Kuypers is also involved in a personal research project on improvisation, “La partition intérieure”, which gives rise to conferences/performances in which she brings into play the live experience of the improvisational state of which she speaks.
Since 2008, she has been working with the Association Mû to bring to life a dance space in a mid-mountain village in Auvergne, where she welcomes artists, gives training sessions, organizes research laboratories and international improvisation meetings.
