About me
Creating, Teaching, and Performing...
BIO
LAURA HICKS (she/they) is a Canadian choreographer, performer, and educator working in Germany. Their practice fuses together research into the haptic and kinaesthetic, with an exploration of states, affect, relation, and agency. Inspired by somatic practices, process philosophy, queer and feminist studies, their work seeks to question and reframe the hegemonic, choreographing with improvisation to localise the body as a site for transformation, agency, and ‘response’-ability. Since 2008 they have created and produced solos, group works and collaborations.
Awarded the Holy Body Tattoo’s ‘BC Emerging Artist of the Year’ in 2009, Laura was based in Vancouver, Canada from 2005 – 2011. Inspired by her experience performing at Impulstanz 2010 for Davis Freeman/Random Scream, she relocated to Germany in 2012. For her work Dritter Raum (2022) and GUT Symmetries (2022) she developed new collaborations in Frankfurt with Martin Nachbar as dramaturg and outside eye. As a choreographer she has collaborated with Schauspiel Frankfurt, LIGNA Media and Performance Art Collective, and Glokowski/Hoesch Matter of Fact Studios, and Compagnie Corps Parlant (Marseille) while also bringing their facilitation and dramaturgical support to FLUX e.V for the Shared Spaces Festival (Mannheim). Laura’s work and interests have always been transdisciplinary, bridging the the arts and science. She holds a BA in International Development Studies and Comparative Politics from McGill University Montreal, and an MA in Contemporary Dance Education from HfMDK Frankfurt.
Teaching and Curating
Committed to her role as an educator as an integral and important aspect of artistic practice, Laura has continuously sought out opportunities to connect to other artists through facilitation and education and also brings with her expertise and training injury prevention and strength and mobility practices and improvisation techniques. As of 2026 she is on faculty in the role of Movement and Body Awareness for actors, with the Folkwang University of the Arts and is a guest teacher for contact improvisation with P.A.R.T.S and the curator for profitraining at Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt. Having apprenticed with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 2008, she also teaches the Critical Response Process (A Method for Giving and Getting Artistic Feedback) having given workshops for Gummitwist Mannheim, Tanzlabor Freiburg, and the Transart Institute.
Choreographic collaborations
Hicks and Reynolds 2018 – Present
Hicks and Reynolds create multidisciplinary dance works that unfold through quirky, humorous, and intimate movement languages—funny but never slapstick—allowing their aesthetic to take a political stance that questions accepted dance hierarchies and traditional notions of beauty, grace, or coherence. Each work investigates how the failure to meet expectations can become forms of resistance to hegemonic ways of knowing. At the heart of their practice lies a commitment to authentic connection, vulnerability, and empathy. By inviting audiences into spaces of shared presence and mutual curiosity, Hicks and Reynolds create performances that feel both intimate and open-ended—welcoming, affecting, and inclusive. Meeting each other in honest, sometimes faltering ways, they reveal the cracks in the façade, treating imperfection itself as a gesture of care: a way to think, feel, and imagine differently together.
Making Impressions and Other Failures (2018) was selected by a jury for the Hessichetheatertage21 and #SPOTTED 2024 and performed nationally and internationally.‘Hospitality Lab for Forgotten Practices’ (2024), a workshop/participatory performance format, and ‘We Are All Here – The Show’ (2025), expanded on their interest in reframing audience/performance relations through the lens of hospitality. ‘We Are All Here – The Show’, a co-production with the Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, also worked more broadly on the theme of choreographies of care (inspired by Claire Cunningham’s work) and incorporated the ‘relaxed performance” format as a performative tool. It was nominated as Best Dance Performance 2025 for the Deutsche Bühne Kritikrumfrage.
Hicks and Bühler 2015 – 2019
Creating several works with Hannah Shakti Bühler in Frankfurt am Main, the duo was interested in the possibilities of combining philosophical concepts (such as becoming, influence, folding and potential) from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri with contemporary dance, and a shared an interest in improvisation. Hicks&Bühler worked with improvisational scores and somatic explorations (using relaxation, sensation, imagery and proprioception), often over extended periods of time. The duo were interested in creating works that trace the vitality of an encounter. Individuals meet and, through this meeting, undergo a process of transformation and change. Choreographically, structures were built from explorations of movement qualities between and through several bodies that move with and in relation to each other. Hicks and Bühler produced three full length works; Reaching Towards… (2016), Der Klumpen (2018) and Strange Loops (2019). Der Klumpen was selected for Hessischetheatertage19 and Strange Loops was a co-production with Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm for the Tanzfestival Rhein Main 2019.
In 2022 Laura produced a remount of Der Klumpen for the Tanzfestival Rhein-Main 2022 as a site specific production for Parkside Offenbach. Recasting the work and re-staging it alone with the support of Neustart Kultur Wiederaufnahme Förderung the work achieved great acclaim and toured further within Germany.