For a detailed CV please navigate to the “CV” page above.
I was interviewed by Dutch newspaper “De Pers” for their series on ‘high potential’ young Dutch people working and living abroad. Click here: Interview by De Pers, 21 August 2009
I was asked to give a lecture (in Dutch) on dance at the Springdance Festival (2010 & 2011) of contemporary dance and performance in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Those interested can email me for the full text of this lecture.
The first work of non-fiction that I read in Dutch from cover to cover was The ABC of the Human Body, a Reader’s Digest publication. I must have been around nine years old when I started flaunting my nascent knowledge of adrenal glands, speech deficiencies, and genetically hereditary disorders to a bunch of uninterested class mates on the school playground. Earlier on I started classical ballet and trained twice a week on challenging and sometimes painfully present Pointe shoes. Thus, with hindsight, I mark my tender age of nine as the starting point of my fascination to map the connections between science and technology and contemporary dance, while paying due attention to affect, intimacy, and embodiment.
Brief Bio
Annabel van Baren teaches at the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht, the Netherlands, where she spreads the joys and finesses of English literature, language, and humour to future teachers of English. After receiving MA degrees in Gender Studies and English (cum laude) she was a post-graduate scholar at York University, Toronto and Roehampton University, London, UK. Her interests are everyday movements, ‘healthy’ vs. ‘unhealthy’ bodies, ‘mind over matter’, and the power of storytelling. These engagements result in various projects, both solo and collaborative. Annabel is experimenting with making sculptures founded on people’s personal narrations; in progress is a dance video series, in which several questions are investigated, such as “how to portray the feeling of sweaty palms?”; she is planning a documentary project on the ritualised aspects of daily movements, together with everyday-friend and visual anthropologist Domitilla Olivieri. Lastly, Annabel has collaborated as an external expert with the Dutch annual festival of contemporary dance and performance (Springdance) and she is excited about the book she’s translating and editing on contemporary Flemish theatre.
Previous Degrees
In my academic trajectory I have approached the issue of bodies in movement from a wide array of disciplinary fields and paradigms. I hold two MAs; both theses were the end products of analyses of different forms of embodiment in mediatised contexts. My MA thesis in Women’s Studies explores how Shelley Jackson’s hypertext work “Patchwork Girl” (1995) provides a feminist alternative to dominant Frankensteinian mythologies of unethical creation, arguing that it succeeds in doing so by offering alternative approaches to linear and positivist knowledge production. The thesis suggests that the hypertext provides an accessible, albeit complex, journey into the land of feminist theory, stopping at various key terms and concepts, such as human and non-human agency, text/author, body/text, and memory/subjectivity. My MA thesis in English Literature and Culture, on the other hand, explores whether the intersecting themes of embodiment and story-telling propose innovative ways to represent bodies and narrate stories in Jeannette Winterson’s novels “Sexing the Cherry” and “The PowerBook” by highlighting the medium-specificity of analog print interwoven with references to digital culture. In my personal trajectory I have choreographed two (solo) pieces and have followed a wide array of dance technique classes, such as Graham, Limon, Post-Modern and Cunningham, as well as collaborating with several choreographers in the function of dramaturge. I am currently in the process of producing a short dance film together with a molecular biologist, which explores the role of story-telling practices in scientific knowledge production, issues of visuality and other sensory experiences, transductive affectivity and somatechnics. An avid follower of the annual festival of performance art and dance in Utrecht, The Netherlands, “Springdance” constitutes one of the sites to fuel my enthusiasm.
