about

connective matter works / Antoinette Helbing’s interdisciplinary practice is spanning choreography, installation, film, and site-specific work. Rooted in somatic methodologies, she investigates the relational and immaterial dynamics that shape encounters between bodies, space, and perception.

Helbing’s works construct situations of heightened proximity in which audiences are positioned as active participants within a shared sensory field. Their presence – visible, affective, and responsive – becomes integral to the unfolding of the work. Spatial context operates as a co-constitutive element, with each site informing the choreography’s form and modes of relation.

Her practice centres on the body as a site of transmission, exploring how movement and sensation articulate and circulate emotional experience. Informed by principles derived from the Feldenkrais Method, the work approaches embodiment as a process of continuous adaptation, attention, and learning. Narrative structures are often displaced in favour of perceptual and affective intensities.

Emerging from Helbing’s formative experience in the former GDR – where non-verbal expression functioned as a necessary mode of communication within restrictive conditions – the work engages with the body’s capacity for articulation and resistance. Through restrained yet persistent choreographic strategies, it proposes spaces for collective attunement, resonance, and transformation.

Her work is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation through operational funding and working grants, and has been recognised with an honorary award (hæderslegat).

Artistic Statement
In my works I wish to create a strong connection between the audience and the performer(s). I am dedicated to creating dance works that offer an intimate and immediate meeting space – a deep collectively shared physical experience. Striving for an experience that bridges bodies – bypassing human intellect – where humanity can be met in a different or new way. Alongside with the performer(s) I wish the audience to embarque on an exploration of the connection within and between people.

I modulate and amplify my choreographers’ privilege of communicating with the audience’s bodies directly by incorporating the somatic learning method Feldenkrais. A Feldenkrais-informed somatic practice serves as my kinaesthetic-tuning process in order to create a choreographic vocabulary that allows for corporeal modes of interaction with the social world. Inviting the audiences to look at the present as an ocean of possibilities – with the option to consciously choose how to treat oneself, others, and equally our planet.