Born in Kortrijk, Belgium in 1986, Anneleen graduated from the Royal Ballet School of Antwerp in 2005 and from P.A.R.T.S./Brussels in 2010. She works as a choreographer, dancer, artistic collaborator and teacher. She is interested in the body as a powerful tool for exploring ways of being together, for making philosophies tangible and for communicating directly with audiences.

By combining intimacy, vulnerability and sensitivity with discipline and craftsmanship, Anneleens wishes to contribute to redefining virtuosity and cultivating plurality. Her work lives in the gap between formal and informal, transparent and mystical, soft and hard, physical and metaphysical.

In 2016 she started a choreographic research project called Transparency in Abstract Dance, which aimed to make the language of dance more accessible by developing compositional keys that allow an audience to unlock and 'enter' a dance. In 2017 this research led to her first creation The moon is the moon is the moon. This performance shares the 'sketches' that precede the making of a choreography, while seeking a balance between legibility and poetry. In 2019 Anneleen created the solo Movement Essays. This work consists of three 'movement essays; On Tempo, On Shape and Multitudes, each of which highlight a fundamental element of abstract dance. Since 2020 she is developing the practice Body Dialogues, in which she initiates conversations with and about the body with different artists. Through this practice she aims to revalue the artistic process and cultivate space and time for contemplation. Occasionally parts of a dialogue leek to an audience, inviting them to step into a process rather than a work of art.

Her latest piece Blue Moon Spring, in which three dancers go on a personal journey of listening and moving to jazz music, premiered in October 2023.

Anneleen is a certified somatic movement educator and teaches improvisation and composition at PARTS, Charleroi Danse and INSAS amongst others.

In Blue Moon Spring, three dancers go on a personal journey of listening and moving to jazz music. They approach jazz as a philosophy, more than a genre. The dance becomes an ongoing conversation. The performers use agreed-upon frameworks as springboards for movements, deviations, and wild ideas. They practice opening to the specific vibrations of each moment and create an improvised dance that we discover together with them.

The musical selection of the piece reflects certain qualities of jazz, such as care, playfulness, friction, in-betweenness, sensuality and celebration. By letting existing music interact with music written especially for the performance, the piece draws history into a contemporary, complex web of sounds.

Each performance is unique: the dancers practice staying vulnerable and passionate through improvisational frameworks, dancing together with their differences, aligning mastery and intuition and dreaming wide awake.

For details and tickets take a look here.

Jason Respilieux, one of the collaborators of Anneleen Keppens in her performance Blue Moon Spring, will be  an artist-in-residence of the 17th edition of the Antistatic Festival.

Over the years as a dancer, teacher, and choreographer, Jason Respilieux developed body and mind practices derived by our capacity to reflect on — interpret and translate — our senses. In this research, he will focus his attention on the idea that touch is a necessity. It helps us to cope and understand our relation to everything around us (from human bodies to plants, and animals…).

Respilieux will  investigate the complexity and subtleties that exist between touching and being touched. This research in Sofia is an individual study that will prepare further research periods.

In 2024, he wishes to invite three dancers to work on this notion and work on triangulation. Then, three bodies  and therefore three unique modes of perception, will question the relationship to touch. From this encounter, the Belgian artist will seek answers to the questions: what is the threshold between the care of a caress and the transgression of a touch? What stories do our bodies tell? What do they leave behind? How do we bear witness to our humanity?

Born in Brussels, bilingual, he begins his training in dance at the age of 12 and join the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and “Codarts” - school for the arts in Rotterdam. In 2014 Respilieux completes his studies, graduating from P.A.R.T.S., the dance school founded in Brussels by Anne Teresa De  Keersmaeker. Since then, he has pursued a career as a dancer/performer amongst multiple choreographers:  Salva Sanchis, Ted Stoffer, Claire Croizé, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker,  Louise Vanneste, Anneleen Keppens.

In parallel, a teaching career also allows him to develop singular body practices and choreographic writing tools. In 2022, Respilieux co-founds the organization “ArTerre” with the aim of supporting and promoting ecofeminist approaches and the development of agroecology in Tarn (France). His combined expertise as a dancer and a teacher opens up the perspectives of a varied choreographic research that is an equal reflection of his diverse parcours.