LAST PARADISE (2024)
Last Paradise is a collaborative transdisciplinary durational performance created by the cohort of SNDO class 2024, where seven makers from each different cultural and geographic backgrounds come together in a temporary community to play, imagine, grief and celebrate the honour of being alive. Presented in June, 2024 at De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam) and C-Mine Genk (Genk).
"Bringing our artistic practices into a conversation as a manifesto is our ever emerging methodology. Acknowledging our lineages and history is our inevitability. Showing up for a future yet unimagined is our inspiration. The world burning around us is our here and now. We seek to summon our choreographies from the deep underground, leaning into the rhizomatic networks, learning from each other and non-human beings, dancing in an entanglement."
The School of Hard Knocks [SOHK] is an award-winning collaborative effort of choreographers, dancers, actors, singers, musicians, designers, and visual artists working under the artistic direction of Yoshiko Chuma. Founded in 1984, The School of Hard Knocks was also the title of the company's first production, a collaboration between Yoshiko Chuma, filmmaker Jacob Burckhardt and musician Alvin Curran, which was presented at the 1980 Venice Biennale.
Since the company began, more than 1,000 people have performed in theatrical dance concerts to street performances, parades, large-scale spectacles and intimate Living Room Projects, Chuma's signature program which brings postmodern music and dance performance to homes, businesses and community centers. Living Room Projects have been performed in homes from Budapest to Ramallah, a car show room in Nagoya, and gardens in the East Village of New York City.
FAKE COMPANY (2018 - 2020)
FAKE Company is an eclectic international group of dance, theater, music, visual, video and culinary artists whose work is embedded and embodied in ongoing improvisational practices. They gather in a fluid and flexible container of artistic freedom within creative collaboration for intensive projects that dive into, dig under, shake up and share the current state of the human condition. Initiated by Kathleen Hermesdorf (1967-2020), and engaging artists who discovered each other at Ponderosa in Germany, FAKE features creative interpreters from Australia, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain, the United States and New Zealand.
FAKE Company presented live works at Joe Goode Annex Theater (San Francisco), DOCK11 (Berlin) and Ponderosa (Stolzenhagen).
HOLD YOUR HORSES (2022) a tribute to Kathleen Hermesdorf
VAGITTARIUS RISING (2015 - 2020)
Vagittarius Rising is an experimental queerfeminist art duo and a fake band. Israeli-American Shelley Etkin and Lithuanian Agnė Auželytė came together as the Vag Sisters in 2015. Their birthplace and artistic home is Ponderosa, a rural arts centre in Stolzenhagen, Germany. Since then, they have traveled with their work in Germany, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, India, and the USA. Straddling the pathetic and the sexy, the classy and the trashy, Vagittarius Rising has reincarnated as a band, a nation, a miracle, a self-documentary, an urban legend and a school for witches. During this time, the Vag Sisters have rocked stages and basements, published The Declaration of the Nation of Vag in feminist journal HYSTERIA, and achieved sainthood. Soon after, Vagittarius performed at their own funeral and transformation at LUCKY exhibition at nGbK, curated by COVEN Berlin, at their last public show Karma vs Kapital. In spirit, Vagittarius lives on.
ANA CHRONA: 10 YEARS OF DANCE FICTION (2020- 2022)
Ana Chrona: 10 years of Dance Fiction - is a live dance documentary that takes place in a futuristic set up and is narrated by two dancers and a fictional artificial intelligence character Ana Chrona. They go over ten years worth of real and fictional memories, dance and personal archives in a wide range of formats: from analog to digital, pixelated, scratched, forgotten; audio messages, interviews, gossip and failed desires - constructing a Time Machine. This is a living chronicle of a generation of artists born in the post Cold War 90s, in the Wild Wild East, bringing their post-soviet identities into a promised Western dream, all while dancing their new virtual bodies into a speculative post-pandemic hope. The artistic research for this work is supported by Lithuanian Dance Information Centre, Bitės Dance Platform, Lithuanian Council for Culture and SNDO (School for New Dance Development).
Created with Ula Liagaitė
Performed with Ula Liagaitė, La Uyi Ihasee, Ciro M. Goudsmit