BIOGRAPHY

CiCi Blumstein dancing Makeshift Body
Video: Elena Klaudis

CiCi Blumstein's work seeks out and vibrates in the unknown spaces between body & film, science & performance, architecture & theatre, transforming the physical and personal into a form that others can experience directly. Born in Germany, she has been working in the UK as a filmmaker, choreographer, installation and performance artist since 1989. She continues to explore experimental and improvisational concepts, which have been at the core of her practice over the last 20 years.

CiCi is fascinated by movement, and plunges into improvisations with buildings, humans and other creatures. She creates performances, cinematic environments and multi-media installations, often in challenging locations and conditions. Her Bag O' Bones series of works is concerned with architectural space and the body. Makeshift Body is a series of works and labs / workshops, exploring multi-media performance based on Butoh and Contact Improvisation movement forms, and developing movement-loving camera devices and filming techniques.

CiCi has studied film, literature, languages, psychology, pedagogy and natural sciences, and trained in cinematography & film production, butoh & contact improvisation and physical theatre in the UK, Germany and the USA.

CiCi's films Cytomotion and Plant Life have been shown at international festivals & events, and her article Makeshift Body - Navigations in Felt Space was published in Contact Quarterly [USA].

You can find a selection of CiCi's recent commissions & projects in Featured Works, and earlier works under Archive. Recent projects & commissions include: Feature Creature - performance & installation at Tate Modern; Unbekannter Ort [Unknown Place] - film & architecture installation with rubble field; Makeshift Body : Cytomotion - film installation with suspended sculptural projection in Lucent, a group show at the AVIT Audio-Visual Arts Festival; Walker Books DVD - an in-depth film portrait featuring award winning children's author Martin Waddell; Fresh Page - a series of art events, community & schools workshops, kinetic video installations, sculptures, and documentary films. Summer Reading Challenge - panoramic film habitats featuring top children's authors in an interactive website ...

Makeshift Body - Navigations in Felt Space

Article first published in Contact Quarterly dance journal [USA], Vol. 27 # 1, Winter/Spring 2002

CiCi Blumstein dancing Makeshift Body Video: Elena Klaudis	By CiCi Blumstein i hurl my body into space like a nomad's tent: temporary shelter from the elements from the impending chaos of disintegration my body holds its own structures inside flowing worlds of blood and membranes a russian doll of spaces at its core the bones bearing witness to a fleeting shape delicate etchings of fibrous attachments will tell a story much later of muscles that once pulled a smile and held me in space
stones and bones
i think of the formation of planets, of how stone matter reaches back to that beginning made of star matter, our bodies mirror the universe, retracing planetary movements on the earth i fling my bones beyond my body, pulling energy from the ground there is no limit and expanding, i make space my body	CiCi Blumstein dancing Makeshift Body Video: Elena Klaudis
CiCi Blumstein dancing Makeshift Body Video: Elena Klaudis	the makeshift body dreams of space travel, of rolling over unknown surfaces, navigating between the stars and planets of an entire galaxy its dark soul, earthbound, transitory, circular, infinite, embraces death and disintegration hovers between past and present present and future it probes the earth down to its core, pushes back up through mud and graves, into the roots and out through the pores of leaves like breath
felt space this knowledge of bones and structure, movement and death struggles out of us into our creations
CiCi Blumstein, Adrian Shephard, Emilia Telese in The Many Ghosts of Sidney Little. Directed by CiCi Blumstein. From Car Park, a multi-media installation in collaboration with 10x5
if we can throw our own bones to the wind, they may journey across the solar system ... ***

For more information please email: cici@ciciblumstein.com