partners in crime

The Israeli artist Ariel Efraim Ashbel lives and works in Berlin. Since 2000, the theatre director has been busy in his work with the development of interdisciplinary structures that are situated in the gaps between theatre, dance, music, and installation.

Antje Pfundtner in Gesellschaft (APiG) is based in Hamburg, produces stage plays, and initiates collaborative spaces. Antje Pfundtner was the first choreographer to receive the Conceptional Grant from the Department for Culture and the Media of the City of Hamburg in 2012/2013 to fund the establishment of her society.

Founded in 2018 by Patricia Bechtold and Johannes Karl, collective äöü employs means taken from theatre, performance, and installation. They subvert, collage, and animate influences originating in language, art, everyday life, and theory while searching for new forms and spaces for narratives.

Founders and core of the collective andcompany&Co. are Alexander Karschnia, Nicola Nord and Sascha Sulimma. The „&Co.“ abbreviation is meant to indicate the collective’s openness to new collaborations with national and international artists from various artistic disciplines.

Since 2014, Schwabinggrad Ballett has been working together with the group Arrivati – an association of refugees and people of color. On demos and in interventions on the street, the two collectives have developed a kind of experimental dance music, played on instruments that can be dragged onto the street: Junk drums, analog synthesizers, melodica, glockenspiel, congas, nineties samplers or the Böhmat, a sixties organ machine of Brechtian format.

Ayreen Anastas was born in 1976 in Bethlehem and lives and works in Brooklyn. Anastas is one of the organizers of the 16 Beaver group, a group of artists based at 16 Beaver street in Lower Manhattan.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe ist ein international gefeierter Redner, Lehrer, Essayist und Autor von zwei Büchern: “These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home” (North Atlantic Books) und “We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak”. In der Reading Group im Rahmen des Projekts „Re_Generation“ haben wir am FFT sein Buch “These Wilds Beyond our Fences” gelesen.

Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe, she explores issues of body and identity, among others, and deepens her practice in contemporary dance as well as traditional Guinean, Senegalese and Afro-Cuban dance. She performs in many of La Fleur’s pieces and took the lead on Love is a warm gun with Franck E. Yao and Monika Gintersdorfer as artistic director of the project.

In their works, Verena Billinger and Sebastian Schulz deal with society, the public sphere, and the choreographic constitutions of humans. For the artistic modeling and staging, they position the body’s role at the centre.

The core collective of the contemporary dance company Cooperativa Maura Morales consists of the dancer/choreographer Maura Morales and the composer Michio Woirgardt.

Gabriel Carneiro was born in Barbacena, Brazil, in 1990. He has been working in the fields of theatre and performance since 2006.

Annick Prisca Agbadou aka Annick Choco lives and works in Côte d’Ivoir, France and Germany. Through her impressive dance skills and her convincing mediation work, Annick Choco is a role model for young dancers.

Pêdra Costa is a ground breaking, formative Brazilian, Visual & Urban Anthropologist, Performer and Tarot Reader based in Berlin that utilizes intimacy to connect with collectivity. They work with their body to create fragmented epistemologies of queer communities within ongoing colonial legacies. Their work aims to decode violence and transform failure whilst tapping into.

CHEZ COMPANY is a polymedia artist collective from Berlin that works at the intersection of theatre, film, internet, and art. They have been exploring digital and physical presence, encounters and communication employing human avatars since 2011.

Dani d’Emilia (they/them) is a white-italo-brazilian transfeminist artist and educator working in the intersections of performance, visual art, devised theatre, radical pedagogy, social-relational and ecological justice.

Nicoleta Esinencu (b. 1978, Chișinău, USSR / Republic of Moldova) lives and works as a writer and director in Chișinău. In 2010 Esinencu co-founded the independent initiative teatruspălătorie.

Franck Edmond Yao, born in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, studied dance and acting at the Kingbok School. He won the African Award for best African dancer in Paris in 2003/04/05/06, developed choreographies for Lino Versace and Boro Sanguy (Jet Set), 2008 Couper Decaler album release as Gadoukou la Star.

The EMANZENEXPRESS project began in 2019 with a two-month (performative) exhibition realized by curator Eva Busch and performance artist and author Julia Nitschke in Bochum at atelier automatique.

Paca Faraus develop a multidisciplinary practice revolving around the theme of self-reappropriation —sensorial and biographical, individual and collective— which they explore on stage, online, in film or during workshops. Each of their works exposes a possibility for thriving for their minoritarian peers and non-conforms, in particular neurodiverse and/or gender nonconforming.

Anan Fries ist digital und performing artist. They ist Mitbegründer*in des Game-Theater-Kollektivs machina eX, welches für seine immersiven, gamifizierten Erlebnisse bekannt ist. Außerdem ist Anan Fries Mitbegründer*in von Henrike Iglesias, einem experimentellen Performance-Kollektiv mit starker Liebe für Pop und Politik.

Montserrat Gardó Castillo is a choreographer, dancer and performer from Barcelona. She lives in Düsseldorf and completed her dance studies at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona and at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. Parallel to her artistic training, she completed a university degree in journalism.

Monika Gintersdorfer studierte Germanistik und Theater-, Film- und Fernsehwissenschaften in Köln und Regie in Hamburg. Sie ist Mitbegründerin der aktionistischen Künstlergruppe Rekolonisation und Regisseurin der 2005 gegründeten deutsch-französisch-westafrikanischen Theater/Performance-Gruppe Gintersdorfer/Klaßen.

Arno Gisinger is an Austrian photographic artist, curator and university lecturer. He lives and works in Paris.

René Gabri was born in Tehran in 1968 and lived in Athens and Los Angeles before moving to New York. In 1999 he graduated from the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Ted Gaier, born in 1964 in Stuttgart, is a musician, author and theater and filmmaker as well as co-founder of the music label Buback and member of the bands Die Goldenen Zitronen, 3 Normal Beatles, Les Robespierres and Schwabinggrad Ballett.

Gintersdorfer/Klaßen have been developing projects since 2005 in which they make the life strategies and forms of expression of the performers the center and confront them with their own strategies and aesthetics. The team is German-ivory with international guests.

Gob Squad is a seven-headed monster with one body, an artist*s collective with many bosses. For 25 years, Gob Squad have been constantly searching for new forms and ways of medial and performative expression, switching accordingly between the formats of stage performance, video installation, interactive live film and urban intervention.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, born in 1982, is a poet, scholar, activist, and author of the forthcoming biography, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde.

Steve Heather is a freelance musician / composer, performance and installation maker based in Berlin. Steve is interested in the repetitive acoustic territories of everyday life informing his and others sonic agency.

Marlin de Haan, Düsseldorf-based director and sculptor, realises theatre works, performances, and films, devises stage spaces, and presents exhibitions and performative interactions in varying working constellations with other artists, in theatre, art, private or public spaces.

Samuel Hertz (b. 1987 Washington, D.C., USA) is a Berlin-based sound artist and researcher investigating connections between sound and climate that emphasise geologic, ecologic, and social listening practices at more-than-human scales.

Petr Hastik is a choreographer, dancer and performer from the Czech Republic. He studied dance theater and dance pedagogy at the Duncan Centre Conservatory in Prague and modern dance at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen.

half past selbst schuld is a German-Israeli artist duo from Düsseldorf, who have been directing their musical comics for the stage for 23 years and have been producing brightly colored, opulent stage comics for the theater, no less opulent audio comics for the radio, and also music and films since 2002.

The (i)dentityteam works in integrated processes structured by interest and competency instead of hierarchy. Their works are poetic, political, sensual, and true to the artistic impulse.

Carmichael Jones works in installation, sculpture, film, photography and performative objects to upend parameters of the encounter and orientation. Often playful and slightly irreverent, their work addresses political concerns of communication and what it means to be a body in relation; the structure of seeing and being seen.

kainkollektiv researches, develops, compiles and stages primarily its own texts, scenarios and performances, installations, exhibitions and theater productions and works constantly on its own opening, dispersion and expansion through closer or looser involvement of different artists, groups and houses.

Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-born interdisciplinary artist. Her practice articulates eyewitness accounts and the collective memory of repressed histories to challenge restrictive notions of „citizenship.“ 

Tümay Kılınçel is a freelance artist based in Frankfurt am Main, Düsseldorf and Berlin. In her work she deals with power relations, such as empowerment strategies.

Lea Kieffer is a, dance artist, and costume/clothing maker. Her work explores processes of transformation and the dialogue between imagination and physicality through dance, bodywork and craftsmanship in hybrid and transdisciplinary formats.

Over the last 10+ years Annick Kleizen have cultivated an extensive practice of collaboration with artists and choreographers in a variety of supporting and co-developing roles: ranging from researching to editing, to co-conspiring, performing, producing and writing. These different roles are all threaded through with a desire to explore friendship and long-term conversations as a possibility to study otherwise.

Jan Lemitz lives and works as a photographer and artist. His projects take landscape, architecture and infrastructure as the starting point for media-archaeological research.

The dancer, choreographer and dance teacher Keren Levi from Israel dances with different companies and independent choreographers in different countries in Europe.

LA FLEUR is a group that has connected dancers, performers, musicians and visual artists across different contexts and generations since 2016. Together, they develop a highly physical performance style suited for a multilingual theatre and film work in which they deconstruct classical authors under a postcolonial perspective while focusing on urban dance

Monique ist Two-Spirit, Métis Körperarbeiter*in und im zweiten Jahr als Moon Dancer*in mit Clan Mothers.

Melanie Lux has been working as a performer and author at barner 16 since 2006 and at the theater ensemble Meine Damen und Herren (MD&H) in Hamburg since 2017.

miu Concept artist, composer, programmer and writer from Japan. He lives and works in Düsseldorf.

mar~yã (they/them), also known as makabra coqito, is a multi-spirited artist born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and hearted in Mexico. They work at the intersections of performance, street theatre, drag cabaret, healing practices, and popular education.

My ladies and gentlemen have turned into a collective. And how a collective works is an important question for everyday work. In many great and critically acclaimed performances, the professional and full-time collective has shown what it is capable of alone or in cooperation with renowned colleagues.

Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is an internationally renowned filmmaker with roots in LesothoHe lives and works in Berlin and Lesotho.

machina eX has been exploring the interplay between theater and computer games since 2010. The Berlin-based collective emerged out of the cultural studies program at the University of Hildesheim and has been producing participatory game theater ever since. machina eX integrates modern technologies with elements of classical illusion theater to create playable theater pieces that are simultaneously walk-in computer games.

Morgan Nardi is a choreographer and director working in the field of dance and performing arts. He developed a series of projects in collaboration with performers, musicians and visual artists from different countries. In his work he is interested in questions of gender and power.

Eroca Nicols currently works as a dancer, choreographer and teacher, but her multi-faceted practice stems from her family of semi-mythic, nomadic caravan people.

Mzamo Nondlwana ist queer, nicht-binär, Künstler*in, Tänzer*in und Choreograf*in, und kommt ursprünglich aus Johannesburg, Südafrika, mit Wohnsitz in Wien. Nondlwanas Arbeit beschäftigt sich hauptsächlich mit marginalisierten Körpern und unsichtbarem Wissen.

Kathrin Spaniol and Morgan Nardi have been working together in various constellations for 20 years. Their work is characterized by a special approach to spaces in a field of tension between narration and formal alienation.

Das onlinetheater.live will die digitale Lebensrealität mit einem Gegenwartstheater besetzen. Online und in digitaler Kopräsenz sendet es Stücke und Performances via Livestream, in Social Media und auf eigens geschaffenen Oasen im Internet. Mit dem Ziel, die digitale Öffentlichkeit aktiv mitzugestalten, bedient sich onlinetheater.live der Kraft des Theaters und sucht nach neuen, eigenständigen Formen, die unseren hybriden Zeiten gerecht werden.

pulk fiktion is a Cologne-base performance group founded in 2007. A heterogenous pulk (german for “bunch” or “group”) of artists from the fields of theatre, film, music, performance, video art, and interactive media, in different constellations, works on productions for children, youths, and adults

Laurie Penny, born 1986 in London, is a book and screenwriter and journalist. She is the most important young feminist (DIE ZEIT).

Pan Pan Theatre was founded in 1993 by co-directors Aedín Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn. The team has created 43 new theater and performance pieces, toured worldwide, and received several national and international awards.

PINSKER+BERNHARDT are Janna Pinsker and Wicki Bernhardt. Founded in 2017 at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen, the duo combines the lines of post-dramatic theater, choreography and performance for a young audience.

Saskia Rudat, born 1991 in Dresden, works as a performer, choreographer, director and author. Her artistic skills and interests range from music, text, directing and acting to mask, puppet and object theater, performance art, dance and acrobatics.

The Rotterdam Presenta platform comprises various artists and performance artists. The label was founded by Stine Hertel and Jan Rohwedder in 2010 and has been firmly established in Düsseldorf since 2012.

Ben J. Riepe, born 1979, is a choreographer and artist. His award-winning performances, videos and digital productions are shown worldwide.

The German-Ukrainian theater collective from NRW subbotnik combines vocal and instrumental compositions, narration and live performance to create its own stage language.

She She Pop is a performance collective founded in the 90s at the Giessen Institute for Applied Theater Studies. The members of the group are mostly women and work as a collective.

Mithu Sanyal is an award-winning author, broadcaster, and cultural scholar. She works in the fields of gender, race and sexualities.

Adania Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974. She writes novels, plays, short stories and narrative essays that have been published in several languages in anthologies, art books, literary and cultural magazines.

The Schwabinggrad Ballet is an activist-artistic collective from Hamburg, which was founded at the turn of the millennium to produce unexpected situations beyond ritualized leftist forms of protest.

Since 2010, Böhm/Kobayashi have curated the exhibition ANT!FOTO once a year at Kunstraum Düsseldorf and Künstlerverein Malkasten. In 2016, together with Oliver Sieber, they curated the main exhibition of the festival of the International Photoscene Cologne under the title „Innere Sicherheit, the state I am in“.

The SeTA currently has 29 members aged between 68 and 91. Every year a new production is staged, either a play from the classical or modern canon, but also adaptations and completely original productions.

After training as an advertising clerk and studying sociology, sports and media sciences, Kathrin Spaniol studied dance at the European Dance Development Center (EDDC) in Arnhem/NL. A recurring approach in her work is the humorous and poetic investigation of individual and collective human failure.

STERNA | PAU is a theatre and performance network with members from Bochum, Dortmund and Berlin, represented by Maren Becker and Laura Pföhler for this production. The artists create theatre for youths and adults, always trying out new participatory formats – during the development process as well as in performance situations.

Joy Mariama Smith ist Installations- und Bewegungskünstler*in, Aktivist*in, Pädagog*in und Architekturdesigner*in. Joy Mariama Smith studierte am Niederländischen Kunstinstitut in Arnheim, an der NewSchool of Architecture & Design in San Diego, an der L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris und am Oberlin College in Ohio.

Neha Spellfish is a programmer, software developer, activist, and multidisciplinary conceptual and noise artist.

The queerfeminist collective creates temporary spaces and images in real time and simultaneously thematises their production.

Ingo Toben, director, lives in Düsseldorf. Since 2007 he has been working with children and young people on experimental live formats at the FFT Düsseldorf.

Prof. Dr. phil. Vassilis S. Tsianos (FH Kiel) unterrichtet Soziologie an der Fachhochschule Kiel. Zu seinen Arbeitsschwerpunkten gehören die Soziologie der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft, sozialwissenschaftliche Rassismusforschung sowie die Biometrisierung der europäischen Grenze.

Kathy-Ann Tan is interested in alternative models of art dissemination, exhibition-making and institution-building that are attuned to issues of social justice. Her practice is informed by a desire to create accessible spaces and formats of conversation, sharing and discussion outside of academia.

Born in Helsinki in 1964 she founded the international performance and music theater collective Oblivia in 2000 where she is a performer and artistic director.

Hans Unstern makes songs, lyrics, musical instruments, performances, and theatre. Current album “Diven” came out in 2020.

Via Negativa (VN) is an international platform for research, development and production of contemporary performing arts based in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Arne Vogelgesang works as a video artist, gives lectures and workshops on the aesthetics of radical internet propaganda, publishes literary texts and works in cultural education.

Liza Witte is an independent artist and perfumer working on the intersection of art, design and fragrance. Being a product designer and ex-dancer by profession, she creates work for art projects, exhibitions, theater, brands and teaches workshops.

waltraud900 is an international collective of artists based in Düsseldorf that has been working together continuously in an interdisciplinary and multilingual way since 2012. In their works, the artists address contemporary questions of identity and social affiliations from a feminist perspective.

Daniel Wetzel, born in Constance in 1969, has been part of an authors-and-directors team with Helgard Haug and Stefan Kaegi under the Rimini Protokoll label since 2000. They develop their works in the genres of theatre, audio play, film, and installation constellations of two or three people as well as solo.

Siegmar Zacharias works in theory and practice of performance. She develops performances and formats of artistic research in her works. Performance is her medium of ecological, posthuman, artistic and political practice, in which uncontrollable materials such as smoke, slime or the nervous system emerge as collaborative partners.