Alejandro Russo is an Argentine-Spanish choreographer and co-director of the company La Malagua based in Lille (France). Russo’s work uniquely blends the disciplines of engineering, dance notation, and movement research. His recent project Être-autre (To Be Other), created over the course of a year while in residence at an auto factory in the north of France, highlights the body in working atmospheres and explores the erasure and withdrawal of corporeal physicality in factory environments. Building on this investigation, Russo is currently developing FabriK: métamorphoses d’un travailleur connecté (FabriK: Metamorphoses of a Connected Worker), a dance-theatre piece that extends this exploration of withdrawal through the lens of remote work and hyperconnectivity, where movement is reorganized, restrained, and reformulated—yet the body’s urge to move persists.”

Russo writes, “As an engineer and a dancer, I have often found myself having to justify the consistency of my training or having to erase part of my professional experience so as not to be seen in a suspicious or foreign way in one field or another. How do you inhabit a body, the same body, in very different experiences? I feel the urgency to trace these labor experiences in my body and to question the artistic and aesthetic potential of bodies at work.”

Sponsored by the Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professorship Program under the UI Office of the Executive Vice President & Provost, NEXUS - College of Engineering, the Department of Dance, and the Department of Anthropology.