Zita Leutgeb



Zita Leutgeb (*1998, Vienna) is a spatial designer, curator and researcher with a background in architecture and dance. She holds a Master’s degree in Architecture, Urbanism, and Building Sciences from Delft University of Technology. Her thesis Bodies, Movement and Architecture: Towards Physical Resonances in Space bridged her experience as a trained ballet dancer with spatial design, exploring bodily resonances towards urban architectures in Rotterdam, NL. In her artistic research, the moving body weaves threads between art, architecture, body politics, queer theory and everyday practices.


© Antonia Leicht


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Selected works
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  1. Five Friends: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, Twombly
  2. Bodies, Movement & Architecture
  3. Dance Notation Drawings
  4. Measured, Performative, Open Body







3. Dance Notation Drawings



Location: Rotterdam, Netherlands
Year: 2023
Category: Artistic Research for Bodies, Movement and Architecture



pencil and ink roller on paper
colored pencil on paper
pencil and ink roller on paper, black and white photographs of the author
Temporal instances, (moving) moments in time, are frozen and translated into drawings that encapsulate the body’s reach across small-, mid-, and far-reaching movement scales. Through the practice of drawing, moments of dance are captured and transformed into a notational system. This experiment serves as a research foundation for exploring space through bodily sensibility, sparking an interest to extend the research into the realm of urban environments.

The body is situated within a measured, interior kinesphere: the very space in which the author taught dance classes. Beginning with larger movements that follow a spatial path, the body arrives at moments of main deployment of somatic energy, highlighted through blue color saturation. These moments are extracted and translated into detailed drawings that notate steps, jumps and turns.

The research then shifts scale, arriving at the kinesphere itself. Here, somatic gestures, marks and traces are recorded within a circular diagram representing the body’s maximum reach. This sphere becomes both a spatial and sensorial apparatus, mapping the intimate relationship between body, movement and space.

As choreographer Annie-B Parson describes, “The smallest circle in the human kinesphere is your breath cycle, and this sphere widens to the space around your body, then widens to your room, your home, and eventually to the wide shot which is a public kinesphere – the town square, the polis, the city.“ 3

3 Parson, Annie–B. (2022). The Choreography of Everyday Life. London, UK: Verso Books. p. 51.