RESIDENTS

Get your free ticket for the Public Sharing 

About Billy Mullaney
Billy Mullaney (1988, US) is a performance maker whose work typically begins by analyzing non-theatrical formal structures such as academic lectures (SEMESTER), tarot card readings (Welcome, I Have Been Expecting You), and promotional trailers (The Glory Machine). 

He is particularly interested in the mode of spectatorship each form engenders: How they address the spectator, organize attention, and dictate meaning.

Drawing on his background in theater, choreography, and performance art, Billy makes performances that subvert and short-circuit the representational logics of these forms. In the spirit of a puzzle, he deconstructs familiar structures to display their inner workings and aesthetics, and to indicate the political stakes of accepting their configuration of reality.

At Bau, Billy will conduct intermedia research investigating comic books and reality TV.

Comics
Comics employ a fundamentally different logic of representing time and space from theatre. There’s an entirely medium-specific code of structuring attention from panel to panel across the surface of a page.

During his residency Billy will be developing setups where narrative elements flow between live performance and comic books. Questioning what elements of character are best represented in each medium. What expectations of genre come from incorporating comics as a form? In what ways does each form enlist the spectator's imagination to represent impossible environments such as dreamscapes, parallel realities, or a fourth spatial dimension?

Reality TV
Preoccupied by reality television's claims to 'reality' as such, Billy is also researching the filmic and public-relations strategies that such programs deploy to construct their brand, and the required unseen machinery and labor to sustain it.

What elements register as 'real' per se about these contrived scenarios? What choreographies of surveillance, image production and capture need to be organized around whatever reality TV trains its cameras on? How does such an inherently theatrical genre fare on a literal theatre stage?

Billy will work with performers, illustrators, video technicians, theorists, and former reality show contestants to devise scenes for the Public Sharing on March 28th.

BAU AIR Alesya Dobysh
20/11 - 19/12

Public Sharing
19/12 20.00h, doors open 19.30h
BAU, Entrepotdok 4 Amsterdam
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Alesya Dobysh is a professional dancer, choreographer and curator based in the Netherlands. She began her career in the street and club dance scene, where she cultivated a love for house dance culture, which has formed the basis of her artistic pursuits. She has been an active participant in the "battle" dance scene, winning main prizes at international events such as Summer Dance Forever (Amsterdam), Juste Debout (Paris), Random Circles (Frankfurt) and many others.

Her artistic practice is committed to experimenting with the fusion of subcultural backgrounds and unconventional forms of expression with performance art, theatre, visual art and sound art. One of her signature approaches is to deconstruct footwork-oriented techniques into an abstract language that she uses to choreograph her works.

Motus Sonus
Together with her collaborator, electronic music composer Max Frimout, she curates an interdisciplinary experimental project - Motus Sonus - that explores the relationship between movement, sound and space. Motus Sonus has been presented at 'De Fabriek' (Eindhoven, 2022), 'Windmill Perform' (Seoul, 2022), 'The Grey Space in the Middle' (The Hague, 2023), 'De Pont' (Tilburg, 2023), 'NP3 RE:Search:Gallery' (Groningen, 2024).

Residency
During the residency, Alesya Dobysh will work together with electronic music composer Max Frimout and two dancers with a house dance background: Melissa Antonelli and Noëlle Vosman. With them she studies the connections between movement, sound and space; and examens how sonic and somatic experiences interact and shape the choreography of space.

One of the residency's main focuses is to develop tools that reveal the acoustic quality of the moving body and space through improvisation and choreography. The three of them analyse how sound compositions and movement scores can merge to create choreographic structures.

Working with the audio perception of movement, the modification and amplification of dance-produced sound, and the interplay of rhythm and silence, they'll create flexible choreographic strategies that adapt to different architectural and acoustic spaces while maintaining their essential character.

This residency is supported in part by DansBrabant, where Alesya Dobysh is this year's PLANmaker.

BAU AIR with Zhana Ivanova
11/10 - 15/11

Public Sharing
15/11 20.00 h. (doors open 19.30h)
BAU, Entrepotdok 4 Amsterdam
Reserve a (free) spot

Zhana Ivanova (Bulgaria, 1977) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam. Her practice involves rearranging and reconfiguring patterns and structures to which we have grown accustomed. She frequently uses performance in order to induce situations where interpersonal relations fluctuate. Language plays a key role, and power relations are of central interest. Her constructions are initially formal and rule-governed; yet within them she insistently exposes the ambiguity of her own rules.
 
Zhana was educated at Queen Mary University College, London, DasArts Master in Performance, Amsterdam, and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. Presentations include a.o. Kunsthalle Basel, Astrup Fearnley Museet Oslo, Fondation D’Enterprise Ricard Paris, ARCO Madrid, Elevation1049 Gstaad, Municipal Gallery Coloredo-Mansfeld Prague, De Appel Amsterdam, Playground Festival Leuven, FIAC Paris, Mendes Wood DM Sao Paulo, Ellen de Bruijne Projects Amsterdam, Framer Framed Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou Paris, Roberts Art Foundation London, Lafayette Anticipations Paris, Oude Kerk Amsterdam, Performatik Biennalle Brussels.

Imaginary Magnitudes
Zhana Ivanova is interested in descriptive language and its capacity to speak worlds into existence.
During the residency she'll be exploring the relationship of language to imagination, drawing on her approaches to script writing and creating structures for unrehearsed performers to navigate.

She'll be experimenting with performative mechanisms, featuring both rehearsed and unrehearsed performers; and be playing around with multiple narrator models, implementing actual and imaginary points of view, seeing in what way she can arrive at articulating more elaborate and polyphonic accounts and perspectives.

A memory of a swimming pool on September 23, 1986 will serve as a reccurent organising image during her explorations.

BAU AIR DOTE
Fazle Shairmahomed and artists-in-community
05/09 - 01/11

Labs every weekend: read more about the labs and register for free

Public Sharing 
Reserve a free spot
01/11, 20.00h. at BAU

Once a year, BAU and Dancing on the Edge team up to host the BAU AIR DOTE. This residency provides four weeks of time and space for a performing artist, whose work resonates with both BAU and DOTE, to dive deeper into their artistic practice and research without the pressure of producing a finished piece of work.

BAU and DOTE find their common spark in the belief that performing artists should be able to be and think freely in the pursuit of their artistic goals. Moving between different borders, bodies, histories and (pre)conceptions.

Healing is communal, healing is spiritual, healing is in the body and in spaces in between, healing is to be in harmony with plants and nature. “What do you feel when you think about the spiritual power of plants and ancestry?”

Artists community
With plant spirits, artists-in-community Anima Jhagroe-Ruissen, Farah Rahman, Shaymaa Shoukry, Ahmad Saleh, Natasja van 't Westende, Agnes Matthews (and others from varied communities), Fazle Shairmahomed is researching a collective artwork in the form of ritual in this BAU AIR DOTE residency.
 

Artistic research
Fazle developed a new focus in their long-term artistic research into the spiritual process of decolonization in 2022, by deepening their relationship with plants in relation to that journey. Fazle invited people from different communities, in which they have been invested, to support them in the collective work Fertile Ground /: A personal research into the spiritual relationship between the Snake Plant (Vrouwentong), which their Nani (mother’s mother) brought with her when she migrated from Suriname, then still colonized by the Dutch. Their Nani has been nurturing this plant ever since, and gifted several branches to her children and grandchildren. The Snake Plant, native to tropical West Africa, is part of a colonial history. This plant has become a symbol of migration, rootedness, family and hybridization.
 
The residency also builds on Dancing on the Edge’s ongoing artistic research around decentralized artistic encounter (converging practices) and overlapping geographies, and in which space has been growing for the presence of plants. 
 
You are invited into this project too! 
You are welcome to participate the Dance Labs, Henna Lab, Incense Lab taking place during this residency.  We will dance, build altars, create incense with Farah Rahman, and feed our unique relations with Henna, facilitated by Anima Jhagroe-Ruissen.
 
Plublic Sharing
A Public Sharing on 1 November at 20.00h. at BAU will close the residency, we warmly invite all participants of the Labs to take part.

BAU AIR Perry Gits
06/09 - 04/10

Public Sharing
03/10, 20.00h
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Perry Gits is a theater director/performing artist and more recently a club/festival programmer and booker.  He uses multiple senses and disciplines in his work to communicate with diverse audiences. Music and movement have always been the driving force in his work.

Research
Perry explores the theme of loss and death. The first inspiration is how important and carefully crafted Ghanaian funeral services are from the minute someone dies until they are buried. Perry will also research, for example, the body temperature when someone dies, when the body is kept in a freezer, and the different burial grounds.

BAU AIR GREENHOUSE
Ira Melkonyan & Jimmy Grima
06/09 - 04/10

Public Sharing
27/09, 20.00h.
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Committed to being an evolving cast of contributors, artist duo Ira Melkonyan and Jimmy Grima install temporary collaborative structures under the umbrella of the rubberbodies collective. 

Ira Melkonyan is an artist and biologist. Through her performances and installations, she explores non-human actants, transitions, fluidity, and liquid boundaries. Ira is from Odesa in Ukraine. 

Jimmy Grima is a multidisciplinary artist-researcher and designer. He works in the fields of graphic arts, performance, archival research and film.

The duo met in Malta, Jimmy's birth island. They both graduated with an MA in Theatre from DAS Graduate School (formerly known as DasArts) and currently live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Blood Thirsty

How much can a person take? Working day in and day out in a laboratory. Between glass tubes, vials and refrigerators, organizing blood. While pandemics spread and wars are fought. Disaster approaches from afar. Strange reflections, desires and visions leak into the regulated routines of a bloodless environment of seemingly hermetic walls and vessels.

With Blood Thirsty, Ira Melkonyan continues her research on the performativity of fluids from a transnational feminist perspective, venturing into what is probably the most metaphorically loaded bodily fluid. Centered on blood and other biological substances as performative agents, this transdisciplinary performance explores the fantasies and mysticism surrounding leaking bodies, political boundaries, and the sense of connection.

Concept, text and performance: Ira Melkonyan
Visual dramaturgy, production and technical design: Jimmy Grima with TinyIsland Studio
Sound design: Isadora Tomasi
Stage direction advise: Biljana Radinoska

A production of the rubberbodies collective
Co-produced with SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Utrecht
With the kind support of VEEM House for Performance, Amsterdam and Arts Council Malta.

www.rubberbodiescollective.com

The development network for dance, mime and performance GREENHOUSE selected Ira Melkonyan for its annual residency.

BAU AIR Robert Steijn and Gluklya/ Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya 
09/05/24 - 13/06/24

Walks and talks
29/05, 01/06, 03/06 and 05/06 at19.00h
More information / sign up via this link

Background information
Take a look at the portfolio page to learn more about the residency

Public Sharing
12/6/24 20.00h 
 
Chachacha at the Marineterrein and beyond

Robert Steijn (Netherlands, 1958) and Gluklya / Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya (Russia/Netherlands 1969) start their BAU AIR research at the Marineterrein and the surrounding areas, by embracing the legacy of the Situationist International, who practiced ‘derives’ (walks) without pragmatic goals.

Their research consists of walks into talks and aims to unite people from different social groups despite their status. Robert and Gluklya will investigate how these walks can rewild and queer our perception of this part of the city. For this, they'll work with artists, designers, cleaners, people from the military and creative industries, citizens, newcomers and the Ghost of Van Gogh.

Gluklya and Robert will attempt to subvert the society of the spectacle by giving space to embodied experiences that question the relationship between the human and non-human worlds.

Robert Steijn (Netherlands, 1958) is a choreographer, performer, director, dramaturge and writer based in Amsterdam and Mexico City. Together with the Mexican choreographer Ricardo Rubio he runs the School of tender thinking, combining spirituality, art and healing practices, inspired by plant medicine and trance rituals.

Gluklya / Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya (Russia/Netherlands 1969) lives and works in Amsterdam. She's considered one of the pioneers of Post Sovjet performance art and co-founded the artist collective Factory of Found Clothes and Chto Delat. She works with performance, installation, text, artivism and video. Her research is revolving around the philosophy of other and possibilities of play within the resistance. 

Boris de Klerk and Finn Borath
17/5/24 - 14/6/24 BAU Amsterdam
17/6/24 - 28/6/24 The Grey Space The Hague

Public Sharing
14/6/24 20.00 h. Amsterdam
27/6/24 20.00 h. The Hague

Finn Borath and Boris de Klerk have been working together on performances and installations since 2019. In the spring of 2023 they started a series of performances called Chamber Pieces, of which Black Box: First Movement (2023) is the first. The only sound source for this musical composition is all the technology normally found in a theater: smoke machines, moving heads, and fluorescent lights. 
 
For their residency at BAU and The Grey Space in the Middle, Finn and Boris focus entirely on fluorescent lighting. They explore the flickering, ticking, and generally "cold" light often found in offices, clubs, and galleries as a sound source for a new work in their Chamber Pieces. They'd like to discover how to play the TL as an instrument and how to develop a form of presentation.

Esther Mugambi
03/11/23 - 01/12/23

Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir's Full Drop practice
06/11

Public sharing 
01/12

Esther Mugambi (Kenya/Australia, 1974) is an Amsterdam-based performance artist. Her work is about creating communities and establishing real connections in a world where technology has made direct communication difficult. 

Where is my body when …?
How do we experience the connection between body and mind? How does it feel to be "in the moment" or in a dream state? How do we perceive energetic bodies? Mugambi's research focused on how we perceive the body in different contexts and situations. She interviewed artists and professionals in her network about how they raise awareness of the body. From all the interviews she compiled an audio recording which she presented at the closing presentation while the audience did group exercises within a spatial scenography. Antidote Radio broadcast this public sharing live.

Collaborating artists are: Marloeke van der Vlugt, Margrét Sara GuðjónsdóFr, Lise Brenner and Federico Bonelli. 

Visit the portfoliopage of Esther Mugambi.

Amparo González Sola
29/09 - 27/10 

Public sharing
27/10

Amparo González Sola (Argentina, 1984) is a choreographer and dancer based in The Netherlands. Her work ranges from dance performances to participative projects. For the latter, she invites people to practice ways of witnessing, listening, and relating to others that strongly focus on reciprocity and co-responsibility.

Researching new work
At BAU, the questions that feminism brought to her life and practice, the ongoing attempt to connect with the cosmology of her ancestors, and her experience of migration all came together in her research process. Against this background, she explored polyrhythms, song, and the role of the spectator in the beginning of a new work.

www.amparogonzalezsola.com

The BAU AIR GREENHOUSE residency originates from and is supported by the Amsterdam development network for performance, pantomime and dance GREENHOUSE. GREENHOUSE brings together the following production houses, companies and development institutions BAU Residencies for Dance and Performance, Boogaerdt / VanderSchoot, Keren Levi | NeverLike, Nicole Beutler Projects and Veem House for Performance.

Go to the portfoliopage of Amparo González Sola

Michele Rizzo
20/03/23 - 31/03/23
25/05/23 - 8/06/23

Shared Practice workshop
31/05/23

Public sharing
8/06/23

Michele Rizzo (Italy, 1984) is a choreographer and artist. In recent years he has created works inspired by the experience of dancing in clubs. A response to the belief that choreography manifests itself as the result of a process of decentralisation of agency. A distillation of the remains of the constant struggle between the tendency to preserve and construct, to decompose and surrender, to focus on the inside or the outside.

Research
During his residency at BAU, Michele will engage in an entirely research-based process that focuses on a very specific aspect of his ongoing practice. He will be developing practices of imagination as creative tools, attempting to demonstrate how these can be seen as a constitutive part of both intimate and social experiences (such as dancing in clubs), rather than as mere manifestations of the realm of the unreal. The research aims to define a language of movement and performativity that favours a mode of existence of discovery and learning, attempting to combat representation in order to construct meaning.

Click here to go to the portfoliopage of Michele Rizzo

Francisca Khamis Giacoman
24/03/23 - 21/04/23

Public sharing
21/04/23

Francisca Khamis Giacoman (Chile, 1998) is a Chilean artist of Palestinian origin. Her recent work deals with fragmented diasporic memories. In performances and installations, she recalls stories of migration and unfolds them at the boundaries of fiction and materiality. Her focus is on the consolidation of intermediate identities.

In her work, Khamis Giacoman combines oral histories and objects from her family with the migrant stories she has heard in recent years, especially those of the Palestinian diaspora in Chile. The effect of intermediate identities is of particular interest to her research and forms the basis of her work.

A parcel she received from her family in Chile now plays an important role in her work. As she opens the box and unfolds the fabric, she reveals stories that are embedded in these materials, but are also mixed with fictional elements. Identities are always constructed between fiction and reality. This act of unfolding provides a glimpse into diasporic memory and an insight into the many in-between states that permeate Francisca's life, as well as so many others.

Caer Ascendiendo (Fall Ascending)
During her residence period starting on March 24, Khamis will continue working on the piece Caer Ascendiendo (Fall Ascending), with the idea of ‘in between’ identities, looking into stories of diaspora through the textile, specifically the object of the parachute.

Click here to go to the portfoliopage of Francisca Khamis

The BAU AIR DOTE residency is a collaboration between BAU and Dancing on the Edge.

Tchelet Pearl Weisstub
26/11/22 - 23/12/22

Public sharing
22/12/2022

Tchelet Pearl Weisstub's (Jerusalem, 1984) practice brings together theater and sculpture in interdisciplinary installations and performances. Her works attempt to embody the abstract notion of time passing, primarily concerning the tension between permanence and vulnerability. In an era where mass computing has overcome our innate limitations (such as the ability to store our memories, never to forget), Weisstub perceives a predominant social climate that denies natural processes of decay, by appropriating technologies, old and new, and placing them in dialogue with what it is to be human. Weisstub's work creates a space to share our human vulnerability and understand it as a collective ontological condition. Utilizing her background in theater, she directs objects in mise-en-scènes, creating sculptures that encompass the presence of life. While in her live performances, she objectifies the human body, exploring its material limitations.

Mat(t)er
Weisstub finds in BAU AIR the opportunity to further develop a series of works on Mothering & Technology called 'Future Present'. During her residency, from 26 November to 23 December 2022, she creates the first draft of a performance called: Mat(t)er, an excavation site of memories related to caregiving. In search for a cyclical and maternal experience of time. A mother and child are cave archeologists, excavating each other's memories and fantasies of care. Weisstub will focus mainly on exploring the physicality of grasping and releasing re-enacted memories of care with the performers. Grasping a memory and grasping another body. Releasing as awakening from a fantasy; releasing as letting go of grip or letting go of dependency.

Click here to go to the portfoliopage of Tchelet Pearl Weisstub

Eglé Budvytytè
04/11/22 - 02/12/22

Tension, Stress and Trauma Release Exercises
20/11/22

Public sharing
01/12/22

Eglé Budvytytè (Lithuania, 1981) works at the intersection between visual and performing arts. She approaches movement and gesture as technologies for a possible subversion of normativity, gender and social roles and for dominant narratives governing public spaces. Her practice, spanning across songs, poetry, videos and performances, explores the persuasive power of collectivity, vulnerability and permeable relationships between bodies, audiences and the environments.

Song Sing Soil 2022

During her research,  Eglé Budvytytè focuses on songs as vehicles for spells and storytelling; exploring how voice, pitch, breath, rhythm, rhyme and repetition could be integral to the content. And how words become sonic pulsations resonating with and affecting the oscillations of the human nervous system. Through the process of writing and singing she will be looking into the relationship between the body and the landscape, vulnerable presence, processes of decay and melodies as medicine.

Click here to go to the portfoliopage of Egle Budvytyte

Artun Alaska Arasli
29/08/22 - 25/9/22

Talk with Artun Alaska Arasli, Billy Mulaney & Anik Fournier
14/9/22 

Public sharing
23/9/22


Artun Alaska Arasli (Turkey, 1987) is an Amsterdam based artist, writer and curator. His current practice concerns the relationship between the artwork, its documentation and the moment the artwork is seen by the viewer. He often presents his sculptural and text-based works solely as photographic documentations in order to set the conditions for their reception and redistribution.  

During his residency Artun aimed to perform an exhibition through a series of immaterial statements and propositions. He created an ekphrastic revival of ideas that were fading away and tied them together to constitute a coherent whole - in a monologue performed by the artist for the first time. 

Click here to go to the portfoliopage of Artun Alaska Arasli

Reza Mirabi
06/06/22 - 03/07/22

Public sharing
01/07/22

Reza Mirabi (Iran/Germany, 1988) finds himself somewhere between a choreographer, visual artist, dancer, and seed collector, with a background in horticulture, environmental education, and reforestation projects in Iran, Kurdistan, India, and Portugal. 
Through sound, movement, and poetics, Mirabi looks for ways to embody stories. Urgent yet fragmented stories of both personal and political memories, materials, and forms of loss. Stories that are formed by listening and imagining, and listening again. Ways of listening with and through the whole body to respond critically to the layered (hi)stories of displacement that he carries within himself.
Listening here ultimately becomes a choreographic process and political act to tap into archives that have been rendered invisible. More recently, Mirabi has moved out of the black box and into site-specific contexts, where listening becomes the ground for rehearsing and co-composing with the material textures, languages, and (hi)stories of a place.

Click here to go to the portfoliopage of Reza Mirabi.

Vera Tussing
09/11/20 - 06/12/20

Public sharing
04/12/20

Vera Tussing (Germany, 1982) graduated from the London Contemporary Dance School and has worked as a dancer, director and researcher in Belgium, the UK and across Europe. Her performances and installations explore how an active connection between performer and spectator can be established by mobilising different senses.

During her residency here, Tussing searched for a 'vocabulary of touch'. Can you hear touch? Is it necessary to see touch too? When is touch sexual or transgressive?

Click here to go to Vera Tussing's portfolio page. 

Astrit Ismaili
09/11/20 - 06/12/20

Public sharing
04/12/20

Astrit Ismaili (Kosovo, 1991) explores the possibilities of 'being as becoming' within the realm of performance. In alter egos, body extensions and wearable musical instruments. Thinking of, about and through the body: as it transforms and is transformed. As it moves, makes sounds and makes contact. As it extends and exceeds itself, reaching out to and touching the other.

In BAU's studio, Ismaili went in search of more opportunities to reinvent themselves: new movements, new voice, new portable instruments that form body extensions and are equipped with sensors.

Click here to go to Astrit Ismaili's portfolio page.