Sofie Lebech
Sofie Lebech is a Danish performing artist, researcher and tutor working in the field between theory, research and performance. She did my artistic PhD at Theater and Performance Studies, University of Copenhagen, and is now a lecturer at the Theater Academy in Malmö.
Lebech's artistic practice is research-based and she writes, performs and stages with a focus on reenactment, documentary strategies and the meeting between fiction and reality. Lebech's aim is to create art that provides an aesthetic, sensory and intellectual experience while creating new spaces for thinking by combining knowledge and performance.
Trained as a performer in London and Buenos Aires, she holds a Master in Literature and Modern Culture from Copenhagen and Paris. Sofie Lebech has taught for several years at the Danish School of Performing Arts and at Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
Lebech's thesis Thinking with Performance: Research-Based Aesthetics in Times of Conflict and Crisis is an artistic research project, in which she investigates how to think critically with performance. In her thesis, Lebech discusses how research-based performance responds to conflict and crisis and creates spaces for thinking where artist and audience can reflect on the material represented.
The project has two dimensions: On the one hand to create two performances with different research strategies. On the other hand, to discuss a research-based working mode, which can be seen in many artistic practices that use, create and perform research to imagine other ways of being in the world. Her two performances focus on conflicts in the societal body and in the individual body. Fragile Lives is a performance lecture, in which Lebech compares terror and autoimmune diseases. This is for her is a performance about torture and therapy, where Lebech uses reenactment of personal testimonies to reflect on the past. The project is based on these two sides where Lebech works artistically with research, while developing a conceptual framework for research-based aesthetics.