Tijen Lawton

Tijen Lawton is a professional dance artist, performer, movement researcher, choreographer ,facilitator and mentor. Her work shifts between performing, teaching, rehearsal directing, mentoring and researching in artistic and academic contexts. Her teaching methodology is based on combining somatic & technical work, improvisation and on supporting constant creativity through moving. She is committed to mentor young dance artists with different career interests and backgrounds, established artists as choreographic support, advisor and movement director. Dialogue, movement, inclusivity, freedom of expression and the ongoing interest in the evolving, moving human body. These are the thriving forces of Tijen’s work as an artist and facilitator.

She studied at Arts Educational School London, The Place London, The Juilliard School New York. Her main body of works spans over a period of 30 years. For 15 years, she was a constant presence in all of Jan Lauwers & Needcompany’s work performing, creating and touring worldwide. Also performing & collaborating with Caterina & Carlotta Sagna, Mauro Paccagnella & Wooshing Machine, Erika Zueneli, As Palavras / Cie Claudio Bernardo, Rebecca Lenaerts, Greet Vissers & Kunstz, Mokhallad Rasem & het Toneelhuis, Marco Toricce, Lisaboa Houbrechts.

Tijen continues creating and performing with other artists and with her own work. Constantly investigating and challenging her own body as an archive… Between destruction and preservation… a mission which is the sum of all influences… sculpting bones, skin, the entire cellular system, enveloping each other, intertwined, bewildered by their collaboration in time and space… the bodies never ending research within its self, its ability to adapt and survive, living within a society with norms and values which are often against human nature.Challenging the body as an archive of sensorial layers and a communicative vessel. Inspired by the purity and complexity of the body and it’s deeply embedded knowledge. The research and the commitment to the unexplainable in the moving body, in all its systems, structures and sensory perception, a raising of creative powers, by the senses, that they become sharper, richer and more potent, the instinct to be overwhelmed.The material quality of the body and the life it lives within an ongoing & sustainable inquiry, the ability to remember and integrate experiences are central components of the creative work of the dancer or the performer.

“My investigation, negotiation and experience is the concept of resonance. Resonance is beyond what is available, attainable and accessible. This means it is elusiveness, that it is impossible to predict or control what the result of an experience of resonance will be, what the process of transformation will result in.”

update June 2023