Andros Zins-Browne was trained as a dancer and choreographer, but his work often gravitates towards the visual arts.
After completing a degree in Art Semiotics at Brown University (US, 1998-2002), Andros moved to Brussels in 2002 to study at the performing arts research and training studios P.A.R.T.S (BE, 2002-2006). He later pursued a research program at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (NL, 2010-2011) in the fine art department. Aside from his performances as a dancer with Jonathan Burrows, Mette Ingvartsen, Tino Sehgal, and Maria Hassabi, Zins-Browne’s own creations have been produced and/or presented across Europe including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Dance Umbrella in London, HAU in Berlin, Kaaitheater in Brussels and the Theater Festival Impulse, Düsseldorf where he received the Goethe Institute Award (The Host).
Andros makes dance performances and hybrid environments at the intersection between installation, performance and conceptual dance, performed by a mix of professional dancers and amateurs. They explore the way in which the human body, movement and matter can interact until a certain melting point is reached and the diverse media appear to take on each other's properties. Zins-Browne bases his work on topical issues. For instance, he has drawn much inspiration from digital culture and it's impact on the human body and behavior, producing science fiction-like performances in which characters move like avatars and real and virtual worlds overlap. In Second Life he studies people's behavior in protected environments such as gated and online communities, and in Neverland the body becomes a hologram.
In more recent work, Zins-Browne focuses on the ambiguous relationship between mankind and his environment. In The Host three cowboys hopelessly try to curb an unstable, inflatable landscape, while the performance installation Welcome to the Jungle immerses the audience in a sensory ecosystem, a house of mirrors where subtle shifts in light, sound and smell question our own experience. Simultaneously with the tour of these works, Zins-Browne currently develops two new dance pieces. In &&&& - The David Lang project he investigates with three dancers and six pianos how mutual interaction influences our behavioural patterns. With The Lac of Signs, a solo for Chrysa Parkinson, Zins-Browne stages an exploration into movement, meaning and information overload, inspired by the dance classic The Swan Lake / Le Lac des Cygnes. For the past 10 years Andros has worked with the principle of ‘ how to make a problematic situation seem unproblematic’ and has said ‘I try first to locate a particular social or political problem that grabs me. I look for what the images are that I can associate with that problem, I look for what the dynamics of the problem might be. I try to find a way that the images can engender a physical practice and the dynamics, a sense of organization. The more these two elements are contradictory, the more complex their relationship to one another becomes.’ |