lee meir

About

Lee Méir is a Jerusalem born, Berlin based freelance choreographer, performer and costume designer. Her works vary from solos to collective formats, always based on the understanding of art primarily as a meeting point between ideas, people and craft. In her practice she navigates the tension(s) between language, movement, sound, and meaning production, as well as what unfolds between what we think we are doing and what we are actually doing. It exposes encounters between conflicting elements which co-exist within the same body, be it a singular body or a social body. Méir treats her solo practice as a home base, a place to come from and go back to, when lost in the wild wild west of contemporary art making, while her collaborative practice is a way to destabilise individual ideas and put political and collective identities into question.

Méir’s works are presented internationally in platforms such as: Tanz im August Berlin, Brighton Festival, Heidelberg Tanzbiennale, Diver Festival Tel-Aviv, Tanzquartier Vienna , a.o. She received grants and scholarships from foundations such as: The Capital Cultural Fond (Haupstadtkulturfonds), the Berlin City Council for Cultural Affairs, Danceweb Vienna, the Israeli Ministry of Culture. In 2013 Lee completed choreography studies at HZT- Inter University Centre for Dance, Berlin.

Méir is a recipient of the Pina Bausch Fellowship 2019 in cooperation with L’Ecole des Sables in Senegal. Between 2017-2018, she curated the series Nah Dran extended, at ada Studio Berlin, where she accompanied young choreographers in realising their first works. In 2020 she collaborated with the Swiss director Boris Nikitin and Kukuruz piano quartet, on 24 Images per Second (Kaserne Basel/Gesnerallee Zürich/ Wiener Festwochen). Her current piece by the way, a participatory performance about death for young audiences, is part of explore dance network, at fabrik Potsdam. Her latest group piece, safe&sound, premiered in June 2021 at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin (HAU4 online premiere).

“ Méir’s work demonstrates beautifully the compatibility of artistic precision and its openness to the unknown. Méir is a performing philosopher who uses her body to deal with contingency as such. Aware of the fragility of life, Méir helps us to confront it as the very truth of the human being. Blindness, which is constitutive for artistic creation is part of it; Heiner Müller once claimed „You can only gain experience blindly.“ Méirs work gives form to this sentence, with admirable precision it opens up to the inconsistency of our world."

(Marcus Steinweg, Philosopher)

Photo by Gretchen Blegen