Bio

Toni Steffens is an artist and acupuncturist trained in dance and choreography. They hold a BA in choreography from SNDO and a MfA from Sandberg Institute.

Researching dance and movement as a survival and community preserving mechanism, extending across human and animal lives, their practice enmeshes thinking, feeling, sensing and moving. Inquiring the cartesian dualism, pervasive to our western societies as a collective wound, Toni aims at developing ontologies that devices embodied knowledge as a tool to navigate political questions. Sensitivity, imagination and emotionality guide as intelligent technologies of our bodies, to assist rewiring the relations we have with our realities. An urgent question of theirs is how healing could look like in our futures to come and what role dance has to play in it.

Toni's works and collaborations have been presented at W139, Framer Framed, Re_Nature Festival, Kunstfort Bij Vijfhuizen, Flam Festival, Les Urbaines Festival, Veem House for Performance, Festival why Not, Pact Zollverein, Tanzhaus NRW, Batard Festival, Come Together Festival, Uferstudios Berlin, Frascati Theatre, Plein Theatre, Perdu Amsterdam, Palais de Tokyo, Van Abbe Museum, Mandala Festival Wroclaw, New Fears Gallery Berlin, 8-Athens and more.

As a collaborator, performer and dramaturg Toni has worked with numerous artists, such as Samira Elagoz, Sophia Seiss, Toni Brell, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Jija Sohn, Sigrid Stigsdatter, Michele Rizzo, Jakob Wittkowsky, Erin Hill, Ira Melkonyan, Enis Turan, Karol Tyminski, Paulina Prokop, Connor Cook, Keerthi Basavarajaiah, July Weber and more. 

In 2024 Toni finalised their acupuncture education with a thesis on Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy .

From 2023-2025 Toni was enrolled in the temporary research MfA Planetary Poetics at Sandberg Institute, in collaboration with Framer Framed, with a focus on climate collapse, and the role of art and activism.

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Artist Statement, July 2022

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My practice combines performance art, sound creation, writing, installation, painting and curation. I further work actively as a dramaturg and project advisor and as a performer and collaborator.
Within the different approaches of my work, I am interested in the conversational and discursive aspects emerging out of each process. I am fascinated by scopes of conversational manners reaching beyond human conventions, that involve a “sensing-into-listening” approach. My works question “human-typical” forms of conversation and value synaesthetic implications and how they may render visible alternative logics of perception.

I therefore value Interpretation, relation, miscommunication, irritation and the attempts and limits of attuning with one another. Developing research around the notion of “co-emergence”, Performance art, for the moment, is the main platform where I am translating my attempts.
Within this medium I am trying to generate a space, where people can arrange or disarrange with the work and with themselves in a shared moment in time, where their witnessing matters and finalises the gesture. Metabolising concepts like Animism, Object Orientated Ontology, New Materialism, Eco feminism and Queer Theories, my recent works are constructed in an asymmetrical, fragmented and non causal style of narration. This reflects my interest in a world, where things are not always meant to fit together, act logically or have a foreseeable faith ahead. Yet it also celebrates the possibility for things to change, to be looked at from another angle and as a way to discuss embodied contradictions and the multiplicity of perspectives inherently carried along.
Working with the idea of switching perspective, and attempting listening on a sensorial, imaginative and emotional level is a consequence of having faith in the body’s ability to feel, sense, converse and express. Coming from body practices and somatic work, with a background in choreography and dance, I approach the body as a medium and aerial, who’s understanding I try to challenge anew with every new project. Considering it a deliberate instrument and a carrier of socio-political and cultural value systems, I am using it as a material to encounter challenging questions, negotiate political concerns and let it take the lead when researching subjects I can’t find myself able to create stable positions to.
Knowing that its intelligence is subjective, or how I like to call it “subobjective”, working through the body humbles me often and demands to embrace complicated states of transitions.
I therefore recognise its political power for what dawns me, is never about knowing something definitely yet more about a potential re-relating and re-engaging, in order to create and adjust its own ethics. On this journey I am reliant on collaborators, of human and non human descent. I therefore work with different sets of materials, like textile elements, metal or wood work, bricks, items of everyday life and sounds, which I approach as agents of change, revealing stories, becoming sparring partners, frenemies, lovers or totems, that offer temporal shelters where scenarios of believing, questioning and negotiating can occur. I like to involve collaborators from a wide range of artistic and scientific disciplines to enter into dialogue with me during research and creation phases.

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