Ida Haugen is a Norwegian-Vietnamese dancer, performer and choreographer based in Oslo. She works across contemporary dance, choreography and performance, within collaborative, collective and independent contexts.
Haugen’s artistic practice explores how movement can give form to experiences that are difficult to articulate through language. She is interested in the body as a site where desire, memory, intimacy and collective experience coexist, and in choreography as a space where these forces can unfold. Her work moves between the physical, visual and sensory, creating situations that invite audiences into heightened states of attention, presence and wonder.
A recurring interest in her practice is desire – not primarily understood as sexuality, but as a fundamental life force that moves us towards pleasure, freedom, connection and transformation. Haugen is fascinated by the tension between restraint and release, repetition and ecstasy, discipline and surrender. She works intuitively and physically, while allowing embodied research to exist in dialogue with conceptual thinking.
In Rose Water (2024), Haugen explored identity, memory and her Vietnamese-Norwegian background through a bodily, visual and auditory investigation of the relationship between past, present and future. The work emerged from a desire to understand a history that existed before her, and how such histories can continue to live through the body.
In Hot Moon (2021), she explored collective movement, ritual and the elusive moment between the present and what is about to emerge. The work brought together contemporary dance with references to the full moon, meditation, mythology and popular culture, and was performed in urban outdoor spaces. Big Dreams (2021), created for young dancers, explored the desire for something larger than the familiar, drawing on spirituality, popular culture and the experience of growing up in the 1990s and 2000s.
Across her work, Haugen is interested in how movement languages, cultural references and social practices can be transformed through choreography. Rather than reproducing existing forms, she seeks to investigate what they generate physically, emotionally and collectively – and how choreography can amplify these experiences into shared encounters between performers and audiences.
As a performer, Haugen is particularly interested in the interplay between movement, voice and presence, and in how embodied expression shifts across different artistic contexts. She has collaborated with artists and institutions including Kari Hoaas Productions, Nagelhus Schia Productions, Oslo Koreografiske, Carte Blanche and The Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, and has performed nationally and internationally, including at Dansens Hus, The Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, La MaMa in New York, and international festivals and venues.
Haugen holds a BA in Contemporary Dance from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) and has received working grants from Arts Council Norway.
Photo by Agnete Brun