As a choreographer, dancer and teacher, Anneleen Keppens combines intimacy, vulnerability and sensitivity with discipline and craftsmanship. Her work lives in the gap between formal and informal, transparent and mystical, soft and hard, physical and metaphysical.

Her first creations, The Moon is the Moon is the Moon (2017) and Movement Essays (2019), emerged from a fascination with abstract movement and a strong desire to make it accessible and legible to a broad audience.

Over the years, her practice has become freer and more diverse. For Blue Moon Spring (2023) she undertook extensive research into jazz improvisation. Her interest increasingly shifted towards the relational, towards what happens between people. She now describes dance as “a way of exploring different forms of togetherness”. Blue Moon Spring was the subject of the thesis of Martha Dewit: Never or, always and. Blue Moon Spring (2023) and the ecotonal nature of performed improvisation in dance.

Anneleen also developed a growing curiosity about other media. Through her practice Body Dialogues (2020-2024), she engaged in long, in-depth conversations with fellow artists, experimenting with text, image, music and video.

Her projects increasingly reflect on societal issues. She no longer works with a body that tells purely formal stories, but with a body that has children, cares for others and grows older. In recent years, care has become a central theme in her work, both in what she creates and in how she creates it.

In 2026, her new solo Lullabye premiered, a performance about the impact of caregiving and motherhood on a body, and about the power of rest and community. After the performance, Anneleen invites people who ‘care’ — for a child, a parent, a partner, or someone in need — to join Sea of Hands, a restorative ritual that aims to hold those who usually carry. 

In 2025-2026 Anneleen was an artist-in-residence at De Weister, a residential care home in southwestern Flanders. There, she developed a Hand Dance practice together with the residents living with dementia. 

Currently, she is working on the publication Mother/Maker - Valuing Experiences of Motherhood in Artistic Practice, a research in which she collects stories of how motherhood impacts the works of fellow choreographers.

Across all these projects, she seeks connection: with herself, with others and with her audience. 

Anneleen Keppens was born in Kortrijk in 1986 and graduated from P.A.R.T.S. in 2010. As a dancer, she worked with Rosas, Daniel Linehan/Hiatus, and others. She began developing her own choreographic practice in 2016. In 2023-2024, she was selected as a Creative Crossroads artist by Life Long Burning - Futures Lost and Found, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. She is a certified Somatic Movement Educator and taught improvisation and composition at P.A.R.T.S., Charleroi Danse and INSAS, amongst others.