Torsten Michaelsen

Torsten Michaelsen is part of the performance group LIGNA, which since 2002 has been engaged in creating temporary situations in which the audience becomes a collective of producers - an association that produces unpredictable, uncontrollable effects that challenge the order of space.

LIGNA's first more widely perceived work, "Radio Ballet" (from 2002) invites participants to follow a choreography of forbidden and excluded gestures in formerly public, now privatized and controlled places such as main train stations or shopping malls. In the process, a new form of participatory theater emerged, which the group updated in 2020 with the work "Dispersion Everywhere" - a collaboration with 14 international choreographers that addressed the question of collective agency in times of pandemic. Pieces such as "Der Neue Mensch" (2008), "Tanz Aller -" (2013) or the adaptation of Brecht's "Die Spitzköpfe und die Rundköpfe" (2022) examine the theater itself as a place where subjectivity is produced.

In addition, Torsten Michaelsen also gives workshops and seminars from time to time.