Femke Gyselinck

is a Brussels-based dancer and choreographer. After graduating from P.A.R.T.S. in 2006, she worked as a freelance dancer with, among others, Eleanor Bauer, Andros Zins-Browne and Esther Venrooy. She was part of Deborah Hay’s Solo Commissioning Project. From 2010 to 2018, she was the artistic assistant to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker/Rosas before pursuing her own choreographic career.

Her work intricately weaves dance with music, balancing subtle performativity with expressive movement. She collaborates across musical genres, from electronic (Anushka Chkheidze) to baroque (B’Rock Orchestra, Romina Lischka & Hathor Consort) and jazz (Hendrik Lasure, Adia Vanheerentals). She has also worked with Platform-K, a company for dancers with disabilities, and Opera Ballet Vlaanderen (OBV). 

In 2018, she created the duet Flamer together with brother and musician Lander, a drummer, composer and producer (STUFF., LABtrio, Lander & Adriaan, …). In collaboration with Romina Lischka & the Hathor Consort, she created 2 dance performances: Lachrimae or Seven Teares to music by John Dowland & Annelies Van Parys and then L'Echo Du Danube to music by Johannes Schenck.

She provided the choreography for the performance Court of Choice part I: PLAY (2019) by musician Liesa Van der Aa & One Trick Pony. Also in 2019, together with dancers Bryana Fritz & Jasmin Gins Posada, she created the mini-opera Pigmalion, set to music by Rameau and performed live by Apotheosis conducted by Korneel Bernolet.

In the short and intimate solo ERATO (2019), Femke focuses on the comfort, scattering, passion, joy, beauty that music can offer and its ability to express the unspeakable. Set to music by Palmistry, Gwilym Gold and Hiatus Kaiyote, she fuses the music and physical expression of her dancing body into one voice.

In 2020, Femke created the musical dance performance Moving Ballads in which she explores unheard-of relationships between pop music and contemporary dance, lyrics and lyricism, portrayal and imagination, choreography and improvisation.

Also in 2020, Femke worked on the choreography for the opera Faust Szenen to music by Schumann and directed by Julian Rosefeldt, a production of Opera Vlaanderen & Montpellier Opera (June 2022).

In 2021, she collaborated again with Liesa Van der Aa & One Trick Pony and signed for the choreography of Court of Choice part II: ENTRE-CÔTES.

Letters 2 Dance, a creation of her own, premiered at in March 2022. Letters 2 Dance is a choreographic elaboration of Gymnastics of the Mind (2020), a research project inspired by the book ABECEDA (1926). Through a dance-like dissection of the alphabet, Femke explored the relationship between movement and typography, between dance and letter images. It resulted in her own dance alphabet Character, published and distributed in collaboration with Koenig Books (November 2023).

In 2023, she created Change of Plans, a musical dance performance co-produced by GRIP and Platform-K, in which Femke shares the stage with dancers Zanne Boon and Oskar Stalpaert and musician-composers Hendrik Lasure and Adia Vanheerentals.

Also in 2023, 324 mountains between us premiered, a collaboration with musician Anushka Chkheidze, at the invitation of europalia georgia. In 324 mountains between us, they show how Femke's danced vocabulary and Anushka's electronic compositions can sometimes bridge the distance between them and sometimes just increase that distance.

In January 2025, Torment of Hearts premiered, a production with baroque ensemble B'Rock Orchestra. Three dancers, two singers and an ensemble of seven instrumentalists give shape to different manifestations of loneliness, triggered by four pieces of music from three different centuries.

She is currently working on Figures of Speech (premiering April 8, 2026, Concertgebouw Brugge), a new collaboration with her brother and musician Lander Gyselinck. This time they invite seven dancers and four musicians on stage and they each set the rhythm for their own discipline.

Femke Gyselinck is one of GRIP’s artistic directors, alongside Jan Martens, Cherish Menzo, and Steven Michel, shaping contemporary dance practices.