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Next Artist Collective 2021

Supported by the Cultural Recovery Fund, the Next Artist Collective (NAC) have been working on the development of their own projects including research and development, workshops, curation of artist talks and developing digital works. The production of these projects has been supported by NAC project coordinators Renée Bellamy, Rubie Green and Sasha Mattock.

The projects include works by Shivaangee Agrawal, Angel Dust, Florence Aurora, Sumi Xiaoméi Cheng, Ashlinn De Schonen, Elettra Giunta, Leila Jassal, Alice Minervini, Saffron Mustafa, Korallia Stergides, Zoe Tankard, Yanaelle Thiran, Alison Thomas. 

Content will be released over the next two weeks, please do come back to this page to visit new NAC works. 


What’s On

A series of computer generated objects in a dark computer generated landscape. The floor is a blurry pixelated pattern. Throughout the landscape are pictures floating in the space: seaside landscape, waterfalls. It is a screenshot taken from the project: last night my dream tapped yours.

Alice Minervini, Elettra Giunta & Guy Ronen’s Last Night My Dreams Tapped Yours

Last Night My Dreams Tapped Yours is an ongoing project that investigates the intersections between dreams, online interactions and dance; especially the blurred realities, the impossibility of distinguishing real life from the Internet and dreaming…

How does the liminal space between falling asleep/falling awake inspire movement? What does it mean to stage an imitation of dreams? Can social dreaming bring into existence alternative realities?

As part of this research, we collected people’s recurrent dreams, first memory of Internet and experiences with online during pandemic. The answers inspired different explorations of ‘wilderness’, ‘touch’ and ‘gaming’ through movement also by using machine learning interfaces that recognise dancers’ movement.

More details coming soon

A computer generated landscape of the inside of a 3D box. The walls ans floor is a blurry pixelated pattern. It is a screenshot taken from the project: last night my dream tapped yours.

Credits

Artistic Directors: Alice Minervini & Elettra Giunta 
Editor & Virtual Set Design: Guy Ronen
Performers: Angel Dust, Emily Murayama, Yasmin Ali Ahmed, Lucia Priecelova, Ioanna Georgopoulou
Soundscape: Alice Minervini, Luis Carlos Marquez, Valerio Angiolillo
Voices:  Angel Dust, Colette Downing, Chao Liu, Elettra Giunta, Emily Murayama, Margherita Melazzini, Ricardo Guimarães, Ronni Winkler, Senait Mekonnen, Sveva Crisafulli, Tiziana Scota
Text and narrator voice: Alice Minervini
Screenshots from: L’Hippocampe (the Sea Horse) by Jean Painlevé

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An image of a person sitting crossed legged on a wooden patio. Their neck and head are not in the frame. The image is layered with another image of silver and copper pieces of metal that have been wrapped and tied around each other.
Image: Zoe Tankard

Alison Thomas & Zoe Tankard’s Flesh & Frame Workshops

The project is a series of two online zoom workshops around our work Flesh and Frame which we created for the Next Choreography Festival 2020. The work revolves around the creation of wearable wire structures, and how these can inform and restrict movement. The workshops involved:

  • a guided process of making a wire structure
  • guided tasks exploring how to respond to the structure and its effect on the body through movement

The project relies on posting materials and we discussed the process and themes arising; collaboration over distance, physical communication of body information, and exploring freedom, restriction, autonomy, power and susceptibility to instructions.

More details coming soon

Credits

Artists: Alison Thomas & Zoe Tankard
Project Coordinator: Sasha Mattock

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College of photos, text boxes (containing google URLs and the title of the project) on top of an image of binary 0's and 1's. The photo is of angel dust eating a piece of fruit.
Image: Angel Dust

Angel Dust & UNIVAC 1108’s murder.mystery.1

This video project explores the ways in which our lives are increasingly intertwined with artificial intelligence. Based on a murder mystery story written in 19 seconds by UNIVAC 1108 in 1973, Angel brought to life 10 characters of the plot or rather they inserted themselves into this computer simulated world. Through the use of drag and dance the project aims to challenge techno-feudalism and the binaries which uphold it. Our future is not being overtaken by the machines but it has been stolen from us for years by the power-hungry people running big tech corporations. Be the glitch you want to see in the world!

More details coming soon

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A split image of two people with their arms in the air. The background behind them is of tower blocks and blue clear sky. The bottom image is upside down.
Image: Ashlinn de Schonen

Ashlinn de Schonen

A pair of dancers lost in time and space, trying to figure out the present.

Credits

Dancers: Luc Maintrot, Elsa Progrebnoï

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Sumi Xiaoméi Cheng’s My Roof and the Sky

-Exploring home space
-„But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And whisper will be heard in the place Where the ruined

House once stood.“

More details coming soon

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Person in a studio bent over making the shape of a capital A. Above them on the wall is 'A for Artist' written in black paint.
Image: Yanaëlle Thiran

Yanaëlle Thiran’s 60 Second Pitch

Emerging artists often face the challenge to articulate who they are and what their practice is about. Yanaëlle’s Zoom workshop aimed to give NAC members the time and tools to make a succinct and clearly structured self-presentation video. Participants reflected on their own activities, values, and aspirations to write a brief self-presentation. They then worked collaboratively to develop and refine the way they introduced themselves and their artistic practice. At the end of the project, each participant will have produced a 60-second video. Having this short and convincing pitch might help increase their chances of success when applying for competitive opportunities.

Video premiere coming soon

Credits

Project Coordinator: Sasha Mattock

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A collage of compute code and links on a black background.

Florence Woolley’s Dance and Digital Reliance workshop

The Dance and Digital Reliance workshops aim to create space for reflection upon the personal and political impact that the shift from part to total reliance upon the digital space, as a consequence of covid-19, has had upon us as dancers, artists and communicators. 

Guided by a set of open resources Dance and Digital Reliance is a largely participant led discussion-based workshop, interwoven with collective writing and movement workshops, that seeks to breakdown hierarchal forms of learning. The second part of the workshop is dedicated to documenting our responses to these questions.   

Manifesto from the workshops coming soon

Credits

Project Coordinator: Renée Bellamy
A special thanks to the participants that will take part in these workshops.

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Tight photo of a persons head with their hands above their eyebrows. They are upside down and their eyes are closed.
Still image from with pek pek (2021) Courtesy of the artist Korallia Stergides

Korallia Stergides’ Between Caring

‘Between Caring’ is an R&D workshop that stems from an ongoing exploration of the vital politics of care in an interdependent world, emphasizing nonhuman agencies.

My choreographic inquiry invites you to reimagine the intimacy of our interspecies relationships and home through guided tasks; experimenting with our voice, movement, space, light, air and object in an outdoor park.

Together we will focus on onomatopoeic parallels and gestures of imprinting in and between human and non-humans; meditating from my own personal narratives with my mother, animals and other non-human elements.

“Imprinting in psychology, is a form of learning in which a very young animal fixes its attention on the first object with which it has visual, auditory, or tactile experience and thereafter follows that object. In nature the object is almost invariably a parent” (Encyclopedia Britannica)

The journey of the workshop is representative of how I would structure a score and creative process. For me it is important to ask ourselves – how do we care for each other? What enactments of care do we share between and toward human and nonhuman species. Is there a difference between how generations experience or view care? What can a caring environment feel or look like for an animal, for a younger or an elder?

Within my practice I research ways that we can embody gestures of intimacy and touch through a metamorphosis. We will explore this decentralisation by hosting ourselves in different bodies some of which suggest that of a mother, a child, a bird, a cat or a lover.

I am interested in abstracting our sensations and creating a new expanded and inclusive vision of care.

Taking my cue from Karen Barad’s text “Many voices speak here in the interstices, a cacophony of always already reiteratively intra-acting stories. These are entangled tales. Each is diffractively threaded through and enfolded in the other. Is that not in the nature of touching?… it may well be the inhuman, the insensible, the irrational, the unfathomable, and the incalculable that will help us face the depths of what responsibility entails.”

More details coming soon

Credits

Cinematographer: Milo Van Giap
Project Coordinators: Rubiee & Renee


A metallic silver style image displaying blurry moving figures.
Image: Stefan Iyapah & Leila Iman Jassal

Leila Iman Jassal & Stefan Iyapah

This project focuses on a feedback between physical and digital realities. Using a mixture of 3D scanning and animation we are exploring how choreography can manipulate 3D digital space through movement, and how this space in turn, also influences the way a choreographer approaches their own moving body.

Video premiere coming soon.

Credits

Choreography: Leila Iman Jassal
Animation: Stefan Iyapah

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