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Ixchel Mendoza Hernández is a Mexican freelance choreographer and dancer based in Berlin. She completed her choreography and dance studies at Artez Arnheim in 2007. In the summer of 2007, she received a scholarship from DanceWeb Europe, joining the ImPulsTanz Festival, in Vienna. In 2009 she was awarded the Artistic Residencies Program exchange for Artist of Iberoamerica and Haiti in Mexico City. Since 2011 she extended her practice into video making, as a result creating the first short movie in collaboration with Anna Weißenfels "when I will come twice and go once" which has been internationally presented. "CARAVAN" is the name of their upcoming short film. As a dancer and performer, she works for Kat Válastur, company s-h-i-f-t-s, Clement Layes, Laurie Young, Elpida Orfanidou, and Susanne Kennedy, among others.
From 2013 to 2015 she had been engaged at the MA SoDA, HZT in Berlin, investigating a phenomenon she called "Visual Ghost". The “Visual Ghost” corresponds to ideas that suddenly become apparent through the senses; by experiencing them. A kind of awareness or consciousness that materializes in sensations. The question and interest rely on what is provoking the experience? and in which manner it is provoked? This phenomenon happens between an event and a perceiver, and nothing comes into existence as long as there is no “event” changing a situation for the perceiver. The "Visual Ghost" is manifold, and she is constantly questioning. As a consequence, it is always in transformation, or let's say evolving, making its nature ungraspable: having a ghosty logic in itself. In her practice, she revisits material re-appropriating it. Visual Ghost is a reverse concept. Instead of reducing different possibilities into one idea, it opened itself to be redefined by the various research she elaborates. In October 2020 she was chosen for the research grant Tanzpraxis Berlin, a pilot project that enables her to do one and a half years of research into her practice. In 2021 she received the research grant #TakeCare of the Fonds Darstellende Künste for a solo research which she further developed at Tanzhaus Zürich in September 2021 and at Tanzfabrik Berlin. In August, she revised and presented the revival of her last work under the name "The Reversed Alchemist: Figure 4-6", funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe. In 2022, together with Jasmin İhraç, Kat Válastur, and Lena Klink she is one of the initiators of the project SPREAD Magazine. The magazine deals with feminist ideas reflecting on living and working conditions and the visibility and accessibility of contemporary dance in Berlin and other communities. Ixchel has collaborated as choreographer on Susanne Kennedy's new production of the opera Einstein on the Beach. The work premiered in Basel in June (2022) and was seen in Berlin in early July as part of the Berliner Festspiele. Her next research under the name The Infinite Gesture (wt), will happen beginning next year in a residency at Tanzfabrik Berlin, having an open sharing on the 13th of January, supported by #TAKEHEART of the Fonds Darstellende Künste. *INSIGHT INTO THE VISUAL GHOST |
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