Siw Laurent is an actress, playwright, performance artist, founder of Active Body Listening and vocalist in the band Bed of Chaos (with guitarist Petter Grøtterud). Recently, she played Amelia in Strindberg’s one-act play ‘The Stronger” at the off-off Broadway theatre American Theatre of Actors on Broadway. Prior to that, she was playing an Austrian immigrant in Ayla Combe’s play ‘The Worker Must Have Bread But She Must Have Roses Too” about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that happened in NYC in 1911; what Wikipedia calls “the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in US history.” Siw simply felt driven to live out the life of an actor largely due to her Grandfather having been stunted in his progress during his early 20s by his father. “He was on stage with some of the most talented actors in Norway at the time, among others Leif Juster. I come from a line of talented creatives: poets, writers, musicians and actors, but none of them was allowed to pursue and fulfill their potential. I feel incredibly privileged to have inherited so much potential, now in NYC, doing what I can to pursue and make justice to the gifts they carried.” Some know her as a performance artist, and recent appearances include Art 511’s EMINENT DOMAIN, Rosekill Art Residency 2018 with Coco Dolle’s Legacy Fatale, Noumena: Initiation curated by Jana Astanov and the NYC Steinhardt Studio in collaboration with Qinza Najm. Sometime after moving to NYC, Laurent founded Active Body Listening, a holistic practice using Embodied Vocal Therapy; a technique based on psychoanalysis for personal holistic evolution that pairs nicely with shamanic drum journeying. This process involves cultivating her clients “conscious relationship to the inherent wisdom that lies within our bodies on a cellular level.” Personally, she names not believing the “self-diminishing misperceptions clogging my ability to listen” as one of her greatest artistic challenges. Generally speaking an overarching theme of her work is celebrating the yin aspects of our existence and of our nature in a “yangified thought system that prevails through our society.” This September, she’s appearing at the Off-site Project, 16th International Architecture Biennale, Venice with the performance ensemble Assembly, consisting of Claire Zakiewicz and Mariana Alviarez, among others. Upcoming, she’s also working on a solo piece on female love, bitterness, fury and manipulation as well as a short film together with British actor and playwright Imogen Roux called Regarde La Lune, Merde! Watch out for her Active Body Listening workshops in Norway, London and Paris this fall.
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