BORN IN LATENT SPACE – lab

A hybrid creative lab and practical workshop introducing artists to the fundamentals of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning through the lens of performance and choreographic thinking. Over several sessions, participants will explore how generative AI systems—like large language models (LLMs), image generators, and body-tracking tools—can become creative partners in movement-based and interdisciplinary artistic processes.

BORN IN LATENT SPACE – performance

A live lecture-performance that unfolds as a speculative, real-time collaboration between the artist and machine learning models. Seated before a laptop, Solano engages with generative AI systems to explore latent space, conceived not only as a technical structure but as a realm of possible stories.

KISS [UNPACKED] – lab

Moving from musical analysis to dance history to the development of the final KISS choreography, participants will explore research tools, learn excerpts, and create their own short sequences within the universe of KISS.

KISS – performance

This work for three dancers evolved alongside Prince’s posthumously released album “Piano & A Microphone 1983”. Brimming with energy and rhythm, the piece explores a range of dance legacies and a framework for the interplay between dancers’ bodies and audience experience.

THE DAY AFTER THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW – lab

Inspired by Solarpunk sci-fi, we will use objects to create a time machine and our bodies to create dances. How will the plants, animals, and humans dance in the Future? Together we will explore and dive into the unique world of making choreography that speaks to children as well as adults.

THE DAY AFTER THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW – performance

This piece for children is a magical journey through time – with colourful costumes, and a lush stage design full of half human/half animal creatures. The future is just around the corner! But what will it be like? Will there be more nature in the cities? More conversations between species? Together we travel to the future and meet the drummer, Elephoctopus! Let’s turn our hopes into reality!

IN THE LOOP – lab

We begin with the rich history of Double Dutch – a DNA double helix carrying rhythm, memory, and possibility. We will step into the ropes, sharing techniques to twirl, enter, and jump in sync. We learn what foxhole and wipe-out mean, develop chants, expand into nature, play music, invent new vocabulary and take care of ankles, shins and knees.

COILING AGAINST THE SUN – performance

In this evolving performance, the ropes become more than tools for jumping – they become ties. They keep rhythm, hold a group together, and honor the long lineage of jumping as cultural resistance. From intense jumping to solemn stillness, soundscapes and sequences, the work also reminds us of the Black feminist perspective that sees Double Dutch not only as a game, but as a living practice of community, joy, and refusal.

MAKING PARTNERSHIP – lab
*IN PERSON WITH A. HAUSER & D. JONES, ONLINE BEBE MILLER

At the heart of our dance-making are moment-by-moment considerations of movement, relationship and profound play. We will develop choreographic specificity through a range of compositional strategies and bring context—sexual, racial, gendered—into the room, shaping how we move individually and together. In our 25+ year partnership with each other and Bebe Miller, we return to touch—using its before-and-after as entry points into skills such as reading bodies, perpendicular/parallel relationships and problem solving through movement.

FABLE – performance

A duet performance revealing the interpersonal subtext and physical mutuality that drives our particular mode of artistic inquiry — connecting audiences to their own experiences of creative partnership. Filtered through the collaboration between Miller, Hauser, and Jones that began in 2001 with the Bessie award-winning Verge, and drawing on 25 years of shared and independent practice, it explores the collision of their internal processes as dance artists, friends, and citizens.

CHŌRI DANCE – lab

Reimagining bodies as ingredients and power structures as recipes, we will mix, contaminate, break, knead, decompose, and ferment the colonial rhythm. Fermented foods from Asia utilize the process of osmosis, a wavering of boundaries where different bodies meet to create balance.  Between the white cube and the black box, space and time, human and non-human, what kind of rhythm do we create together?

CHŌRI DANCE – video installation

The film symbolically uses  ‘Asian cuisine’ to explore the characteristics of diverse Asian bodies and their individual narratives. Through performance, video, and sound, Chōri Dance interweaves identities and acts as a critical and lively archive of ongoing collaboration – opening spaces for shared experience and dialogue.

BLOOMING SESSIONS – lab

In this dynamic 360-degree experience of the piece, we will explore freestyle dance techniques (Hip Hop & Krump) and slam poetry to release negative emotions, build confidence, and tap into our higher selves. In the end we will create our own slam and dance piece together.

CONCRETE ROSES – performance

A trio dance and slam performance blending Hip Hop, House, Krump, and vocal freestyle choreographed by Estelle Ebenga alongside the dancers Iman Gele and Sandra Roberts. When words fall short, the trio lets it all go. They push each other toward greatness. They dream together. They root for one another. A tribute to sisterhood.

LEARNING FROM PLANTS ABOUT REFUSAL, SOLIDARITY AND DIGESTION – lab

Working with plants from the garden and collective concerns, we will engage in somatic mapping of how plants can be allies and guides in questions around labour, solidarity, and metabolizing injustice. We will learn to listen with our bodies to the sounds and movements between the cracks. The “second workshop day” takes place within the frame of the ABOUT DANCE forum.

I DON’T WANT TO SWALLOW ANYMORE – performance

An improvisational performance engaging the materiality of speech, the effort of speaking up, and the commitment to stay with processes even when they pose discomfort. This somacoustic, drooling lecture addresses labor, solidarity, and indigestion—things we can no longer swallow or stomach.

ABOUT DANCE — forming futures – forum
TRAININGS FOR POLITICAL IMAGINARIES

ABOUT DANCE – forming futures is an exchange forum for professional dance and performance artists that addresses themes of precarity and possibility in the dance and performance sphere. Each weekend-long forum is structured and hosted by invited guest artists. The format of the forum is intended to be experimental, interactive, and grounded as much in discussion as in movement. This special edition will be hosted by Siegmar Zacharias, Luísa Saraiva, and Jule Flierl in collaboration with the Freelance Dance Ensemble Berlin.

Three meals included with forum.

ORIGIN OF VOICES & ORIGINAL VOICES – lab

We will share practices that support the participants to question external constraints on their voices. We will explore new relationships to the voice by sharing several methods from our creative process: disillusioning lip-syncing, theories around ventriloquism, guttural voice techniques and counting in monstrous voices.

MIRI NÉ SORI – performance

Miri Né Sori translates to “Milky Way sound” in Korean. In the Pan-asian myth “The Cowherd and the Weaver”, appear two lovers who are separated by the Milky Way on opposite ends of the sky. Starting from this (im)possibility of achieving the state of completeness, Miri Né Sori explores the yearning encounter of oscillating waves of voices overlapping – stemming from two bodies that constantly elude identification.

IN, OUT, OUT – lab

Participants will experiment with Aïta breath patterns to generate movement, synchronize with others, and create a shared physical language. We’ll explore the tension between individual and collective action, using the breath to navigate moments of stillness, instability, and release.

KMS OF RESISTANCE – performance

A power solo where breath acts as a trigger for movement, rhythm, and interdependence. Inspired by the Moroccan tradition of Aïta, where the breath serves as both a musical and physical guide, the work reveals the body’s instinctive responses to shifting breathing rhythms, creating a dynamic interplay between what happens internally and what is seen externally.