Bio

Toni Steffens studied contemporary dance and choreography in Cologne and Amsterdam. Between spectatorship and material, the artistic research often tends towards detecting possibilities to converse from within-between an environment. Sketched out at the intersection of installation and performance art, Toni’s recent work researches ways of attending, that exceed the separate/binary idea of subjectivity and reflect on the concept of co-emergence.

Notable helpful modalities for this practice are speculative empathy, (mis)communication, auto curiosity and experiencing and relating without denying difference. Toni's approach to performing arts is therefore always highly subjective or subobjective and navigates ethical and political concerns through the use of senses, perception and emotions. Those always intersect with non human agents, with associations and imagination, finding their way into the studio and into the conversations of the matter.

In late 2019, Toni co-organized Unfamiliarities, an initiative for non-funded, fragile works of all medias in need of audience. In 2020, together with Keerthi Basavarajaiah and Veem House for Performance, they curated a 10 days event, on the larger understanding of the term Movement.

Since 2020, Toni is part of a 2 year trajectory within New Fears, Gallery for Dance and Performance Berlin, invited and initiated by Julian Weber.The project aims to give visibility for artistic practices at the intersection of visual arts and dance. For more information please visit: https://www.newfears.net.

Toni’s work has been supported and shown at Les Urbaines Festival, Come Together Festival, Veem House for Performance, 8 Athens, Flam Festival, Frascati, New Fears Berlin, Tanzhaus NRW, NB projects,Pact Zollverein,Batard Festival and more.

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

In 2024 Toni is about to finalize their acupuncture education with a thesis on Takotsubo Cardiomyopathyor broken heart syndrome.

Since 2023 Toni is 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.

Toni uses the pronouns they/them and she/her.

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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 curating 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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