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).
YOSHIKO CHUMA & THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS (2014-2023)
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).
VAGITTARIUS RISING (2015 - 2020)
Vagittarius Rising is an experimental queerfeminist art duo and a fake band. Shelley Etkin and 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.
[publication] LETTERS TO POPE FRANCIS (2020)
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 90s, in the Wild Wild (European)East, bringing their post-soviet identities into a promised Western dream, all while dancing their new virtual bodies into a speculative post-pandemic hope.
Created with Ula Liagaitė Performed with Ula Liagaitė, La Uyi Ihasee, Ciro M. Goudsmit Photo by Tom O'Doherty Advised by Tautvydas Urbelis, Clara Amaral Camera Ursula MarcussenTechnical support Roan Lo-a-Njoe, Walter Nelissen
The artistic research for this work is supported by Lithuanian Dance Information Centre, bitės Dance Platform, Lithuanian Council for Culture and SNDO.
SOFT NOISE COLLECTIVE (2018-ongoing)
Soft Noise Supervisores Benévolos is a constellation of seven sound artists that came together on tour in Serbia in 2018. In 2022, Soft Noise Acousmatics released its' first record as a new label. Members of the group are active in several music projects and bands together in on-going and project-based formations as well as running a sound event series Asterisms in Berlin.
I REMEMBER YOU (2025 - ongoing)
A concert-performance series in collaboration with Jaike Stambach that blends improvised music with conceptual performative art. During each event, the music performance is recorded onto an audio cassette. As part of the performance, this cassette is subsequently encased into a material of choice - concrete, wax, molten metal, etc - and thereby at once preserved and destroyed in the process. Since the cassette is the only recorded trace of the event, this act encourages the audience to consider the value of their memory of what they have witnessed, as opposed to an objective recording of it that could be consulted at a future date.
We live in an age of relentless digital recording and storage of events both personal and public. The effort to maintain this rhythm presents us with ever-growing technological hurdles and various ecological fallout. On one level, I Remember You can be seen a short moment of poetry that exists only in the moment, emphasizing the beauty to be found in the ephemeral. But it also aims to contribute in its own way to the important discussion of what we have to gain and lose as individuals and communities in the systematic digital archiving of our lives.
I Remember You #1: Beton is funded by Musikfonds e.V. by means of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (Germany).
In Sonic Portals, its creator – Ciro M. Goudsmit – combines his research on low-frequency oscillators, with (afro) futuristic thinking: A possibility to curve “reality” and create alternative ones, where colonialization didn’t happen. Inspired by musicians such as Sun-Ra, Lee scratch perry, Gabber Modus Operandi, Drexciya, and a place called space. With a group of intergalactic beings, they create a landscape of sound where you can feel your whole body shake. Using movement research, subwoofers, bass shakers, vocoders, and DYI instruments as elements to open different portals hidden in between the waves. Not in the need for another utopia but in the need for different options.
The performance created by Ciro M. Goudsmit and his team is a continuation of the STUDIO theatregallery’s trend in which young artists combine various forms and genres of art – in this instance sound installation, dance and video – in order to search for new means of expression and explore them as the carrier of contemporary, critical reflection on the world.
Choreography: Ciro M. Goudsmit Performance: La Uyi Ihasee, Agnė Auželytė, Kofi Ayno Yeji Boanyah Artistic advice / outside eye: Paula Montecinos Oliva, Geo Wyex, Joy Mariama Smith Music: Rachwill Breidel Costume: Floor van Hellmond
MO (2025)
A participatory dance work by Mia La-Brossard, built from mosh pits, punk concerts and LARPing. Using gaming structures and DIY dramaturgy, MO invites performers and audiences into a chaotic, communal choreography of impact and play.
With: Agnė Auželytė, Christian Johannes, Gergely Ofner, Helene Ridderberg, Janushka Treurworst, Kairo Fumilayo Edwards, Yooha Cheon, Guillaume Lamour, Léa Valéry, Rafael Reineita Ferreira, Xiao Chuyue, Yadhira De León Matos, yadin akira bernauer, Yel K. Banto, Yujing Liu, Famil Zaman Light: Roan Lo-a-Njoe Documentation: Nellie de Boer, Gergely Ofner, Marley Meijer. Presented at Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond, Amsterdam.
"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."
GLITCH (2021)
A work by Flavia Pinheiro.
Glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. A choreopolitical approach of an open public machine of desire.This machine will evoke the invisible that has not yet been born throughout devices that shifts the spacial notions, the inner / outside perception, the verticality, the ontogenetic interfaces with the parasympathetic control, allowing a queerness to unfold and to unveil other beings and modes of existence. Glitch was possible due to a collaboration inter academy with SNDO students and the Conservatorium of Amsterdam.Glitch was presented in Overpark, Oosterpark and Central Station and was part of MITsp - Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo.
Choreographer and performer: Flavia Pinheiro Artistic collaborator: Tom Oliver Jacobson Performers: Agnė Auželytė, Dora Brkarić, YuJing LIU (Hugo), Ciro Goudsmit (Zero), Sára Korom (Sasu) Musician and Performer: Gabriel de Oliveira Research mentors: Andre Lepecki and Pedro Manoel Images: Neda Ruzheva and Antonia Pushkareva Editing: Tom Oliver Jacobson Music: Hedra Rockenbach
