Hey there, hope you’re doing alright. Hope you’re happy sometimes, hope you’re loved, I hope you are excited by something, and if not its okay, someone is excited about you, maybe me(probably me). Thanks for being here.
I’m Nathaniel, a dance artist living in Brussels, Belgium, originally from the southern United states of america. So I come from there, and also New York a little bit. I thought to write this more informal, more conversationally, because third person strikes me as a bit pretentious if I’m writing it myself and lord know I am self-producing everything just like most all dance artists out here, if you’re not writing your own bio… well, I guess that’s like the 1 percent of dance.
I’m active in the dance field as a maker, a choreographer, an instigator of performative situations, a curator, a dancer, a performance artist, a member of an artist run collective called the artist-Commons(we have a space in Brussels, be build our own dance floor, sound, studio, cozy places to work, coffee machine, come by!), a dramaturg if I get a bit more opportunity, and a person who goes to protests. I’m not sure why the last one is in the “dance field” part, but let's let it slip and see what it does.
My work has been supported by wpZimmer, deSingel, NeedCompany, Zinnema, CinnemaMaximilian, The Green Corridor, Ponderosa, Circo Zero, Level 5 studios, Danspunt, De Kriekelaar, artist-Commons, New Polyphonies, WipCoop Antwerp, SoAP, In Situ Maastricht, Joe Goode Annex, Atland, and the Flemish Community through research and residency subsidies. .
I studied at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities for 1 year(gender women's sexuality studies/dance), then dropped out and went full time to Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet professional school which I completed in 2016. From there I went to San Francisco Conservatory of dance for half a year. Most recently I completed the research program at APASS post-graduate program(2022) in Brussels. I have no degrees.
Some recent projects I’ve been excited by are Tanin, a collaboration with visual artist Hamed Deqhan, which is a participatory dance performance inviting the audience into the memory of a futuristic dance diaspora, inspired by the Iranian dance diaspora between Iran and Usa in the 1980’s. I’m also super stoked about PLOTTING, a collaboration with Sophie Melis, which is a dance festival that her and I curate and organise. We just had our first edition and many lovely people came, we invited some personal idols/teachers/favs Keith Hennessy, Paz Rojo, and Joy Mariama Smith. Together we created a temporary community centered around artistic exchange/ We didn’t sell workshops, instead each artist rotated sharing some things they were busy with for the first half of the week and the second half of the week we opened it up to group and journeyed together. There were performances, round tables discussions, open stages, and traditional Wallonie dance parties. Lastly I’m excited about the research I’ve been embarking on in dance, which has come together to form a more and more coherent method helping me shape dance performances and happenings. The method seeks to practice accompanying dance as a thing in itself, a “raw-material-signification”(Paz), so locating it as a concrete action in space that does something (aside from merely representing). This dance in itself is a presence in a room, it's the center and it displaces the performer. It moves in the body of the room. It travels through all the bodies. If we follow it we come into happenings, what shapes those happenings produces situations, and from seeing what certain situations produce we can gleam something, project, imagine, feel, digest, masterbate, explore, experiment. A few dance performances I’m excited about are Tripsitting the Cuddle Space, a collab with Keith Hennessy, as well as Untitled Cuddle, a 20 minute dance i’ve been able to share now 3 times.
so Watch out for Tanin! Watch out for PLOTTING, Watch out for more dance performance experiments.
Hope to see you soon!
Also, a quick note, I can’t update the website with more photos of videos of my more recent work because wix is fucking expensive, so check out the links below if your curious to see a little bit (:
Untitled Cuddle: https://vimeo.com/1002383586
Regurgiscore: https://vimeo.com/894730056
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_princessnathanieldespoubelles/
