guy cools
Dr. Guy Cools is a dance dramaturge. He is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Ghent University, where he finished a practice-based PhD on the relationship between dance and writing. He has worked as a dance critic and dance curator. He curated from 1990 till 2002, the dance program of Arts Centre Vooruit in Ghent, Belgium and has also curated many international festivals, conferences and research labs, amongst others the 3rd Modul Dance Conference: Ethics in Aesthetics? For an ecology of both the environment and the body for the European Dance House Network in 2012 and the ChoreoLab Ways of Seeing Rhythm for Reso at Dampfzentrale Bern in 2015. As a production dramaturg, he worked amongst others with Jean Abreu (UK), Koen Augustijnen (BE), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (BE), Danièle Desnoyers (CA), Alexander Gottfarb (AT), Lia Haraki (CY), Christopher House (CA), Akram Khan (UK), Joshua Monten (SUI), Arno Schuitemaker (NL) and Stephanie Thiersch (DE).
Cools is a much sought after choreographic and dramaturgical mentor. He has been mentoring amongst others the project Danse et Dramaturgie in Switzerland from 2013 till 2015; the Biennale Dance College in Venice from 2018 till 2020 and the Atlas program of Impulstanz in Vienna in 2019. He lectures and teaches at different universities and arts colleges in Europe and Canada: amongst others University of Ottawa, Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts in Tilburg; University of Limerick in Ireland; University of Ghent, Belgium. His most recent publications include The Ethics of Art: ecological turns in the performing arts, co-edited with Pascal Gielen (2014); In-between Dance Cultures: on the migratory artistic identity of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Akram Khan (2015); Imaginative Bodies, dialogues in performance practices (2016) and The Choreopolitics of Alain Platel’s les ballets C de la B, co-edited with Christel Stalpaert and Hildegard De Vuyst (2019). Performing Mourning. Laments in Contemporary Art (2021). With the Canadian choreographer, Lin Snelling, he developed an improvised performance practice ‘Rewriting Distance’ (see also: www.rewritingdistance.com) that focuses on the integration of movement, voice, and writing. Cools lives in Vienna.
curriculum vitae
