Choreographer, dancer, performer, dance scholar, mentor

Jenny Ocampo is choreographer and dancer based in Berlin and Bogotá. She was born in Cali, Colombia where she began her professional dance studies. In 2000, she moved to Germany where she received her dance degree at the Folkwang, University of Arts, in Essen in 2004. During this period she was selected by the choreographer Pina Bausch to dance her pieces Sacre du Printemps and Tannhäuser. From 2004 until 2009, she worked as dancer for the Daniel Goldin Dance Theater Company at the State Theater of Münster. Since 2009, she works independently, doing her own projects and also in collaboration with other artists and theaters in Germany and South America. In 2015, together with the choreographer Marcela Ruiz Quintero and the director Philip Gregor Grüneberg, she founded the company Hidden Tracks. They have created international productions co-produced by the Colombian and German government, performed at festivals and theatres in both countries, such as, in Germany, the Theater im Pumpenhaus in Münster, FFT Düsseldorf, Dock 11 in Berlin, LOFFT Leipzig, Zeche 1 Bochum, and in Colmbia, the Teatro Varasanta, Teatro El parque, La Factoria Léxplosé. Her solo MIRAGE, a Self Portrait (2016) is has being supported by Centro cultural alemán in Ecuador, Goethe Institut of Buenos Aires, Plataforma festival in Berlin and Festival Danza en la Ciudad in Bogotá. Her latest piece Damp Sheets is the first part of a series of works under the Expanded Being project.

Jenny´s interest in choreography started already in her homeland Colombia, she has produced several projects and pieces since then. Her questions and departing points for her current work have to do mostly with perception and transformation. Her method of work to develop her language is based on improvisation and the development of states, which are involving mind and body. Her latest project Expanded being, is a series of works, which depart from her recent research in the field of extended perception. In this project, she investigates processes of finding new spaces in the relationship between bodies and surroundings, in which imagination and intuition as well as sensations of gravity and time, play a significant roll. She believes in expansion as a way of dealing with the other in her work.

Ocampo conceives choreography as a natural, emergent process in which what is needed for a certain question will take its natural and unique order. Here, she sees such an event as not just determined by humans, allowing a sort of instability and unfolding the sublime character of human actions and emotions.