HELLERAU – European Centre for the Arts, Dresden

Artefactourists* are a collective of four choreographers Valeria Januškevitš, Keity Pook, Sigrid Savi and Kadri Sirel and the dramaturge Kerli Ever. The dancers share a history of studying at Viljandi Culture Academy and the group recently worked together on a performance at Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava (2022). Their autobiographical investigation includes memory, labour, and the inherited working body in the Eastern European context. The group is developing a co-creative nomadic performance practice that, emerging from the body, remains truthful to individual needs within a group while concentrating on the experience of rooting amongst scattered identities.

* the act of remembering through movement; memories triggered by travelling through places and artefacts.

STICKY Productions (Edginton/Lothe/Olsen/Parsons) is a collective of queer, female, dance artists based in Norway. Their practice delves into the bodily and the sensitive, the playful and the peculiar. Using the receptive and expressive body to investigate their subject matter, their performances play between literal and abstract to offer audiences proximity to imagination and opportunity to kinesthetically absorb stories. The artists share a drive to create environmentally conscious work that centres new or untold narratives. Between 2020-22, STICKY created their first work, Økohelter, a performance for children played at Dansens Hus, Sentralen, Bærum Kulturhus amongst others, and selected for the touring network Dansenett Norge Spring 2024. STICKY is in development of their new dance work OOZE, approaching nature from a Queer Perspective. Through an imaginary, sensory, and somatic journey into the world of slugs, we invite sexuality, sex, fluidity and transformation into the room.

(previously known as C A L L S)

We are Caroline, Amelie, Lisa, Laura, and Steph, a loose crew of performers, dancers, artists, strippers, musicians, stage and costume designers, media artists, and researchers. We don’t all embody all of these categories, but we all sail through several of them. As individuals we are seasoned practitioners with our own practices but together we form a formidable crew that is as interested in chartering the unknown as we are in keeping the ship clean, i.e. holding space for each other and following the spiral all the way down. The enmeshment and collaboration between us is complex and sticky, and this group is not so much of a fixed collective as a container for chaotic growth. We are interested in alternative narratives as antidotes to neoliberal hegemony, gender as a vehicle against the state, representations of femme anger, decolonising the gaze, and the poetics of the cosmos found in the synecdoche of the human body.