ACC CREATORS Residency is a platform for creation and production rooted in art and technology. The 2026 edition centers on the theme Speculative Communities, inviting projects that explore how artistic and technological practices shape collective imagination, systems, and shared futures.
Selected creators will develop new productions during a five-month residency at ACC, culminating in presentation at the ACC CREATORS 2026 Residency Exhibition.
The program seeks proposals that investigate creative processes across art and technology, with particular attention to interdisciplinary and experimental forms.
Who Should Apply
This residency is designed for creators worldwide working across:
Art & Technology
Audiovisual practices
Immersive sound
Hybrid and interdisciplinary formats
Applicants should be exploring new modes of production, speculative frameworks, and technology-driven artistic research.
Residency Structure
Five-month development period
On-site production at ACC
Presentation within the ACC CREATORS 2026 Residency Exhibition
Focus on new project creation and production
For full eligibility criteria, production support details, technical facilities, and funding structure, applicants should review the official ACC website.
Submission Dates
Submission Period: February 13 – March 1, 2026
Applicants are encouraged to prepare proposals in advance due to the limited submission window.
Why This Residency Matters
Residencies centered on art and technology offer artists sustained time for experimentation beyond presentation-driven cycles. The ACC CREATORS Residency emphasizes process, speculative thinking, and production infrastructure, positioning selected artists within a framework that supports research-driven and technologically engaged practice.
For artists working at the intersection of art, sound, media, and immersive environments, this five-month structure provides a significant development arc culminating in public exhibition.
If you are a mid or advanced-career performance artist based in New York City and looking for a meaningful infusion of support for a project idea, the Jacki Apple Award offers direct project funding at a significant scale while connecting you to Franklin Furnace’s longstanding performance art legacy and peer networks.
About the Opportunity
Franklin Furnace is honored to present the Jacki Apple Award for Performance and Artist Projects, named in tribute to artist, educator, and advocate Jacki Apple. The award celebrates Apple’s enduring impact on the New York art scene and supports artists whose work contributes to performance art, media, and interdisciplinary practices.
Each year, one New York City–based artist receives a $10,000 award to support the creation or realization of a performance or artistic project. The institution requires that the supported project be completed within one year of receiving the award. Mid and advanced-career artists, including past recipients of Franklin Furnace’s FUND awards, are eligible to apply.
Who Should Apply
This award is best suited to artists who:
Are based in one of the five boroughs of New York City
Work within performance art, hybrid performance, or performance-linked projects involving media and exhibition
Have substantial professional experience (mid or advanced career)
Seek funding to realize a major project or deepen existing work
Are prepared to complete their project within one year of award receipt
The award is not limited to early-career artists and is open to those who have established a body of work and a track record of exhibitions or performances, specifically supporting mid-career and established practitioners seeking substantial project support.
Support for project costs including creation, presentation, media, or publication
Recognition within Franklin Furnace’s performance art community
Inclusion in Franklin Furnace’s roster of awardees and related initiatives
This award does not include a residency or travel support but centers the funding on artistic investment within the New York performance field.
How to Apply
Applications are submitted through Franklin Furnace’s online portal hosted on Submittable. Applicants must provide a project proposal, biography/CV, and sample documentation of recent work.
Application deadline: May 1, 2026 @ 11:59 PM ET.
Visit the official Jacki Apple Award page for full eligibility and application details.
Why This Opportunity Matters
The Jacki Apple Award is significant for performance artists in New York because it offers direct project funding at a meaningful scale without tying the award to a specific institutional presentation or residency cycle. By foregrounding project realization and artist autonomy, the award aligns with practice-driven approaches and celebrates the legacy of an artist who shaped performance culture in the city. It strengthens independent artistic development and supports ambitious work that might otherwise remain unrealized.
A focused opportunity for New York performance practitioners to secure substantial support for work that advances their practice.
If you are an artist working across embodied, movement-based, and multidisciplinary performance practices and seek a sustained, collaborative, and process-oriented environment in New York City, the BAX AIR residency offers material support, community, and professional advising at a critical stage of project development.
About the Opportunity
The Artist in Residence (AIR) program at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) is a longstanding incubator supporting performance artists with sustained time, space, and institutional investment. Founded in 1993, the residency is designed to help artists deepen research-driven work before it enters larger production contexts. BAX places emphasis on process, inquiry, and peer exchange within a collaborative cohort structure.
Artists selected for the 2026–2028 cycle will participate in an 18-month residency in Brooklyn, where they will have access to rehearsal facilities, mentorship, professional development, and a supportive multigenerational arts environment. The residency culminates in opportunities to share work through open studios and public engagement moments.
Who Should Apply to BAX Artist in Residence
This opportunity is ideal for artists and cultural practitioners who:
Work in dance, movement, theater, performance art, or interdisciplinary modes rooted in embodied practice
Seek long-term research and development time
Thrive in a cohort setting with peer and advisor exchange
Are committed to process-oriented work rather than immediate presentation outcomes
Live in one of the five New York City boroughs for the full residency period
Note: Artists outside NYC or those in full-time degree programs are not eligible for BAX Artist in Residence.
What Is Offered
Selected residents receive:
450 hours of free rehearsal space over 18 months
A $8,000 artist stipend
Monthly cohort meetings and one-on-one coaching with BAX staff
Professional development consultations
Advisory, production, and marketing support
Fiscal sponsorship through BAX
Support for parent artists through free arts programming for school-aged children
This blend of financial, physical, and community support gives artists the conditions to deepen their practices and prepare for future presentations with institutional and peer networks.
How to Apply
Applications are accepted through the official BAX website. Applicants typically submit:
A project description or research agenda
Artist biography/CV
Work samples or documentation
Supporting materials per program guidelines
Application deadline: April 2, 2026 @ 11:59 PM EST.
For full eligibility and the application portal, visit BAX’s Artist in Residence page.
Why This Opportunity Matters
BAX’s AIR program is recognized for centering performance practices that resist immediate output and instead invest in artistic process, experimentation, and community. Through sustained residency time, mentorship, and access to rehearsal facilities, artists incubate work that later expands into larger national and international arenas. Multiple cohorts have gone on to significant new commissions, performances, and community-anchored projects, contributing to performance culture both locally and globally.
If you are looking for sustained time to think, research, and recalibrate your practice outside production pressure, Kyoto Retreat offers a quiet, self-directed environment designed for depth rather than output. The program is particularly suited to artists whose work depends on long-form inquiry, cultural context, and attentiveness to place.
About the Opportunity
Kyoto Retreat is an international residency and retreat program based in Kyoto, Japan, designed to support artists and thinkers through sustained time, space, and cultural immersion. The retreat centers on individual research trajectories and provides participants with the conditions to step away from production cycles and institutional pressure.
The program situates artists within Kyoto’s layered cultural landscape, encouraging engagement with place, history, and daily rhythm as part of the creative process.
Who Should Apply
This opportunity is well suited for artists and cultural practitioners who:
Are seeking uninterrupted time for research or development
Work across performance, visual art, writing, or interdisciplinary practices
Are interested in site-responsive or context-driven inquiry
Value retreat, reflection, and long-form thinking over presentation-based outcomes
The program appears flexible in terms of career stage, making it accessible to emerging and established practitioners.
What Is Offered
Participants receive:
Private accommodation in Kyoto
Dedicated time for self-directed work and research
A quiet, focused environment oriented toward reflection
Proximity to Kyoto’s cultural, historical, and artistic resources
The retreat prioritizes process and research rather than production, exhibition, or performance.
How to Apply
Applications are accepted through the Kyoto Retreat website. Applicants are asked to outline their practice, intentions for the retreat period, and preferred dates.
Application deadline: July 15, 2026.
Details regarding fees, accommodation options, and retreat duration are provided on the official site.
Why This Opportunity Matters
For contemporary performance and interdisciplinary artists, Kyoto Retreat offers a rare alternative to output-driven residencies. Its emphasis on time, presence, and research aligns strongly with practices rooted in process, context, and long-term artistic inquiry.
A valuable option for artists seeking depth, slowness, and cultural immersion outside production-oriented residency models.
The Dark Festival 2026: Winter as a Site of Encounter Chatham and Columbia County, New York February 16–22, 2026
Founded in 2006 by Judy Grunberg, PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance has developed a national reputation for presenting contemporary performance in dialogue with landscape, architecture, and community. Based in Chatham, New York, PS21 presents work across indoor and outdoor sites, placing artists and audiences in direct relationship to architectural, environmental, and civic spaces throughout Columbia County. Over the past two decades, the organization has expanded from a seasonal presenter into a year-round platform supporting creation, research, and public engagement.
In late March 2025, PS21 appointed Vallejo Gantner as its Artistic and Executive Director. Gantner brings more than twenty-five years of international curatorial and leadership experience, including roles at Performance Space 122, now Performance Space New York, and the Onassis Foundation USA. At PS21, he is extending the organization’s commitment to contemporary performance through expanded seasonal programming and a focused consideration of how ambitious work can be situated within rural and civic contexts.
Running February 16–22, 2026, The Dark inaugurates PS21’s winter festival format. The program activates multiple indoor and civic sites across the region, bringing contemporary performance, dance, and interdisciplinary work into spaces that encourage proximity and sustained engagement. Rather than treating winter as a pause in cultural activity, the festival approaches seasonal conditions as a material context shaping how performance is encountered and shared.
With The Dark, PS21 formalizes a winter gathering point that reflects how artists and audiences already live and work in the upper Hudson Valley. The region has long functioned as a site of making, retreat, and informal exchange for artists connected to New York City and beyond. Positioned in February, the festival also creates a temporal bridge within the broader performance calendar, connecting the January festivals in New York City, including Under the Radar and Exponential, to the early spring season, as institutions such as BAM and The Skirball Center for the Performing Arts continue presenting significant international work. In this way, The Dark operates as a connective thread linking rural and urban performance contexts through shared artists, audiences, and forms of attention.
The Dark joins a growing set of international festivals documented through ContemporaryPerformance.com’s Festival Highlights series.
my tongue is a blade is a three-hour durational movement performance structured as an ongoing practice of relation, memory, and mutual attention. Performed by Okwui Okpokwasili, Bria Bacon, Kris Lee, and AJ Wilmore, the work unfolds within a dense visual and sonic environment in which performers commit to remembering, holding, and bearing one another over extended time. Audience members are invited to enter and exit freely, encountering a shared space shaped by sustained presence, gestural vocabularies, and narrative frameworks that address memory, identity, and the instability of persona. The performance foregrounds a reciprocal relationship between performers and audience, activating a space of attention in which looking itself becomes a subject of inquiry. Artist Website Photo: Luca Truffarelli
Nothing #62: a bluff is the third work in Autumn Knight’s ongoing investigation of the Italian concept dolce far niente, often translated as the sweetness of doing nothing. Performed solo, the piece unfolds through spontaneous response to the specific conditions of the space and the audience present. Knight works without a fixed score, allowing timing, orientation, and action to emerge in relation to attention, fatigue, and encounter. The performance considers economies of time, attention, and survival, alongside the role of creative labor within those systems, while remaining open to the varied expectations and projections each audience member brings. Artist Website
In Plain Site marks the first collaboration between the Trisha Brown Dance Company and PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance, bringing a bespoke selection from the company’s repertory into Chatham’s newly restored Masonic Hall. Presented at dusk, the work places Brown’s choreography in direct conversation with the architecture of the space, heightening her longstanding interest in how movement is absorbed into, and reshaped by, its physical surroundings. Company Website
Across decades of choreographic practice, Brown’s work has consistently engaged questions of site, orientation, and spatial relation. Rather than treating space as a neutral container, her dances adapt to their environments, responding to light, scale, and condition.
Drinking Brecht is a live illustrated essay performance by performance artist and filmmaker Sister Sylvester that explores genetics, synthetic biology, economics, and theatre history through layered narrative and multimedia approaches. The work uses DNA extracted from a hat worn by actors in Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble as a conceptual starting point, engaging with scientific and theatrical histories in a format that blends performance and essayistic inquiry. As part of the event, audience members attending Drinking Brecht will be offered an alcoholic beverage, and the work is presented in an intimate theatrical setting where complex scientific and cultural ideas are interwoven with performative gesture. Artist Website
The Dark joins a growing set of international festivals documented through ContemporaryPerformance.com’s Festival Highlights series.
ContemporaryPerformance.com maintains an expanding Festival and Venue Database documenting contemporary performance festivals, presenters, and performance sites worldwide. The database serves as a shared resource for artists, audiences, and presenters seeking to understand where work is being made, shown, and supported across regions and seasons.
Opportunity: Open Call Mittelyoung2026 Where: CIVIDALE DEL FRIULI (33043) UD When: from 11.12.2025 Deadline: 10.02.2026 Online Application: www.mittelfest.org/en/mittelyoung/ Fee to Participate or Apply: Free
Open Call:
Send your artistic project for a paid opportunity on the international stage of Mittelfest, the festival of Central Europe.
The Open Call for Mittelyoung is officially open from 11 December 2025 to 10 February 2026. If you are under 30 and have a theatre, music, dance, or circus project, Mittelyoung is the right place for you.
Mittelyoung is one of the top under-30 festivals in Europe: every year it brings artists from across Central Europe and the Balkans to Cividale del Friuli, offering space to new voices on the scene and providing concrete support for their work.
For 2026, we are looking for projects that engage with the theme Fear: not as a blockage, but as momentum, vision, possibility. A starting point for imagining other perspectives and new languages.
Where: Cividale del Friuli (Udine), Italy When: 14–17 May 2026 What we offer: paid participation and the opportunity to present your work in an international context
Who can apply
Artists and companies under 30 from: Albania, Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine, Hungary.
How it works
A group of under-30 curators will review all applications and select 9 projects to be presented during Mittelyoung Fear (14–17 May 2026). Among these, up to 3 shows will then be selected to be re-programmed within Mittelfest Fear (16–26 July), with additional support and visibility.
These posts are not affiliated with Contemporary Performance Network, but are of interest to our community. We post these with the caveat to check the sources and research the opportunities or views expressed in the posts.
Under the Radar Festival January 7–18, 2025 New York City
Since its founding in 2003 by Mark Russel, the Under the Radar Festival has played a central role in shaping the landscape of contemporary performance in New York. In 2006, the festival was included in The Public Theater season. The festival emerged in response to a growing field of artists working outside traditional theatrical forms, bringing together experimental theater, performance art, dance, and interdisciplinary practices. Over two decades, Under the Radar has become a key site for international exchange and U.S. premieres, supporting work that prioritizes formal experimentation, political urgency, and live inquiry. The festival’s curatorial approach has consistently foregrounded risk, hybridity, and practices that resist easy categorization.
The highlights selected here were chosen for how clearly they articulate distinct strategies within contemporary performance. Each work demonstrates a rigorous relationship to form, whether through image composition, engineered systems, durational structure, or embodied research. Rather than offering a survey of the program, this selection focuses on pieces that reveal how artists are working now: how they construct meaning through constraint, how bodies function as archives or instruments, and how performance continues to operate as a site of experimentation, friction, and sustained attention.
Banushi’s MAMI builds a visual-poetic theatre language in near-silence, using image composition and staged memory to approach the mother-child relationship as an emotional landscape. The work’s force comes from its refusal to over-explain, relying instead on choreographed proximity, objects, and the slow reveal of tableau to carry grief, tenderness, and inheritance. The program framing links “mami” (mother) and “mam” (food), placing nurture beside hunger, offering beside consuming, and locating care inside a charged, uncanny domesticity.
Dates: Tue, Jan 7 (7:30 PM); Wed, Jan 8 (7:30 PM); Thu, Jan 9 (7:30 PM); Fri, Jan 10 (7:30 PM) Tickets:https://nyuskirball.org
Tina Satter / Half Straddle Adapted from The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Presented as part of Park Avenue Armory’s Under Construction Series and by Half Straddle
This work-in-progress adaptation treats Fassbinder’s chamber drama as an engine for performance tension: a sealed apartment, a concentrated relational field, and a romance that quickly becomes an architecture of control. The Under Construction framing invites attention to how Half Straddle builds performance, how text, bodies, and design systems produce volatility, and how intimacy turns procedural. The narrative stakes are clear, a designer in isolation, an obsessive attachment to a model named Karin, and a breakdown in emotional governance.
TECHNE Homecoming functions as an expanded performance ecology, an exhibition format that treats installation, immersion, and durational encounter as its primary dramaturgical tools. The program describes six large-scale installations and immersive performances that investigate identity and kinship through biological, mythological, and digital bonds, positioning the audience as moving witness inside a networked environment rather than a seated receiver. Featured artists include Andrew Thomas Huang, Damara Inglês, Miriam Simun, Sister Sylvester, Natalia Manta, and Tamiko Thiel, signaling a curatorial logic oriented toward hybrid media languages and embodied interface.
Narcissister’s Voyage Into Infinity is constructed as a chain reaction, a live, chaotic causality machine that collides reclaimed objects with the spectacle logic that has shaped the artist’s masked practice for two decades. The work explicitly riffs on Fischli and Weiss’s The Way Things Go (1987), then shifts the authorship optics by foregrounding female-appearing performers as drivers of the action and as the image under pressure. A live score by Holland Andrews pushes the piece toward punk charge, with the title drawn from a Bad Brains song. The signature Narcissister mask operates as critique and distortion, holding beauty standards, objectification, and the malleability of race in a single visual device. The result reads as choreography, stunt system, and feminist revisioning at once.
Wet Mess Presented by Under the Radar at Dixon Place
TESTO works through “mess” as method, using movement and pre-recorded interviews to push at testosterone, drag edges, and the performance of transition as an unstable, comic, abrasive score. The program language is explicit about the piece’s surreal spectacle and its commitment to confusion, camp decision-making, and bodily rhetoric that moves between the mundane and the made-up until those categories collapse into each other. Rather than presenting a clean arc, the performance leans into instability, testing how desire and identity appear when language slips, when images overrun explanation, and when the body becomes a shifting site of projection.
Dates: Tue, Jan 13 (9:30 PM); Wed, Jan 14 (9:30 PM); Thu, Jan 15 (10:00 PM); Fri, Jan 16 (10:00 PM); Sat, Jan 17 (9:30 PM) Tickets:https://events.humanitix.com/testo
Autumn Knight Commissioned and Presented by The Chocolate Factory TheaterU
Knight frames NOTHING: more as an “anti-still life,” a durational composition built from object movement, disruption, and continuous reconfiguration. Three performers produce momentary images through shifting arrangements of size, texture, and density, then break those arrangements, re-read them, and sometimes merge body with object to create new composites. The work explicitly resists narration and legibility, favoring process and renewal as its central structure, a practice of assembling the self out of parts under conditions of ongoing change.
Opportunity: Open Call – PQ Performance Where: Prague, Czechia When: June 2027 Deadline: January 31, 2025 Online Application: https://pq.cz/pq2027/open-calls/ Fee to Participate or Apply: Free of charge.
Description Of Opportunity:
Whatever form it takes, whatever atmosphere it evokes, scenography is an inseparable component of performance: it unfolds in time, in space, and in relation to the presence of the audiences. It is only complete when experienced. PQ Performance, a program section of Prague Quadrennial 2027, highlights these essential qualities of scenography by inviting audiences to encounter it live, in the moment of its actualization, when it comes into existence in a performance.
Artists are encouraged to apply with performances that are scenographically rich or design-led, taking place in a range of environments and performance spaces, and engaging diverse audiences, including children.
How To Apply:
You can submit via an online form via the link below: https://pq.cz/pq2027/open-calls/
These posts are not affiliated with Contemporary Performance Network, but are of interest to our community. We post these with the caveat to check the sources and research the opportunities or views expressed in the posts.
Tere O’Connor’s program at New York Live Arts brings together Construct-a-Guy (1984) and the world premiere of The Lace, offering a rare opportunity to encounter forty years of choreographic thinking in direct conversation. O’Connor has long treated dance as an autonomous system, a place where movement exists after language, and where meaning unfolds through sequencing, rhythm, and the accumulation of disruption and tangent. Across these two works, he returns to strategies that shaped his early career, reframes them through decades of practice, and probes how choreographic structures form, destabilize, and recombine in relation to queerness, perception, and lived complexity.
Construct-a-Guy, performed by the phenomenal Tim Bendernagel, retains the unruly vitality of its original presentation 40 years ago. Capricious rhythmic change, spatial fragmentation, and sudden shifts of sensibility form a composition that refuses hierarchical ordering. The piece arrives as a rapid collision of references and citations, both formal and quotidian. Movement veers from flirtation to opacity, from complex footwork to casual gestures. Moments spark associations with a vast history from Cunningham, Balanchine, Graham, Childs, and the queer sociality of downtown dance, but each echo appears only long enough to be disrupted.
“Movement veers from flirtation to opacity, from complex footwork to casual gestures.”
The work’s volatility reflects what O’Connor later described as the “closeted mind,” a survival architecture formed during his childhood and teenage years and later realized during the act of coming out in the early 1980s. According to his talk between pieces, he describes the closeted mind as multiple figures inside a single consciousness, including the enforcer, the analyst, and the strategist, each policing and adjusting the body at high speed . This description sits within a wider field of thought that examines divided perception. W. E. B. Du Bois articulated a related dynamic in his theory of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a concept that captures the lived condition of holding an inward sense of self while simultaneously being registered through the eyes of a dominant, oppressive culture. Although emerging from different histories and contexts, both frameworks illuminate the ways internal multiplicity forms under pressure. Each describes a perceptual architecture shaped by vigilance, self-monitoring, and continual recalibration of presence. O’Connor’s choreography translates this condition into motion, where rigor, multiplicity, strategic tangent, and queer complexity collide. This mental choreography becomes the engine of the dance. Sequencing tilts, cuts, and pivots. Tangents gather force. The dance never settles into wholeness; it thrives in the sidelong.
The Lace takes this early set of concerns and stretches them across a larger ensemble. The cast moves through shifting patterns where timing, proximity, and relational density form the work’s structure. O’Connor’s sequencing strategies appear in expanded scale: events accumulate, dissolve, and reconstitute themselves. Gestures thread through bodies and then weave through the group. The choreography generates meaning through adjacency rather than illustration. Like Construct-a-Guy, the work approaches dance as a post-linguistic expression driven by the strategies first articulated in that early solo and expanded through decades of inquiry, a space where vigilance, rigor, and continual recalibration intertwine with joy, community, and hope, folding into one another and expanding outward.
“This mental choreography becomes the engine of the dance.”
The performers sustain this architecture with striking clarity. Their attention to weight, tempo, and micro-adjustment allows O’Connor’s intricate sequencing to remain legible without becoming rigid. Small shifts in focus ripple through the group. The dancers hold the material with precision while allowing for the porousness the work requires, where relationships form and dissolve in real time. Their labor reveals a collective intelligence shaped through years of shared practice.
“The dancers hold the material with precision while allowing for the porousness the work requires.”
O’Connor framed the evening as an inquiry into consciousness and its structures, and this becomes central to the experience of The Lace. Movement operates as thinking. His choreographic technique emerges from the interplay of the past and a speculative future. His discussion of surviving oppressive frameworks, the patterns that reinforce normative narratives, casts new light on the dance’s strategies. The work reorganizes expectation. It places tangential action at the center and frees the dance from familiar arcs of development or resolution. The choreography becomes a site where other modes of togetherness can be imagined.
Across his career, O’Connor has resisted labels like avant-garde or experimental, arguing that such terms marginalize practices that diverge from conventional narrative or aesthetic frameworks. This program demonstrates the clarity of that position. Construct-a-Guy and The Lace form a continuum. The earlier work reveals the seeds of O’Connor’s craft: rhythmic dissonance, conceptual layering, and the refusal of prescribed structure. The new work reveals how those seeds have grown into a complex system of choreographic thought, one that considers consciousness as a choreography of attention, drift, and disruption. O’Connor’s contribution to the field continues to reside in his commitment to dance as an art of multiplicity, where the intangible states of life become material.
What remains after the program is a sense of continuity across time. The dances share a profound compositional logic, one shaped by decades of observation and inquiry. O’Connor’s work invites audiences into this logic, asking them to participate in the assembly of meaning rather than receive it. In doing so, the evening affirms the vitality of dance as a form that generates new ways of perceiving, thinking, and being together.
Photo: Maria Baranova
Credits: Construct-a-Guy (1984) Performer: Tim Bendernagel Lighting Design: Michael O’Connor Music: Diane Martel
How do the bodies we inhabit become machines? How do the machines we build carry our failures, our gestures, our hesitations? In a time of prosthetics, avatars, and surveillance interfaces, the question of what counts as living movement belongs in the theatre. In Under Construction at the Holand Festival, Geumhyung Jeong invites us into a workshop of failure and repair, where robot-figures assembled from medical skeleton models and mechanical components take awkward shape. What begins as an act of construction becomes a performance of collapse, adaptation, and care.
Exploring the Work of Geumhyung Jeong
Geumhyung Jeong is a choreographer and performance artist whose work probes the relationship between body, object and technology. She studied acting, dance and animation-film in Korea, and her practice consistently uses animatronic figures and everyday objects in ways that destabilise human presence. Under Construction (2025) is commissioned by the Holland Festival and presents a hybrid installation-performance in which robot-like figures move, fail, are maintained and adapt.
Geumhyung Jeong’s Under Construction
Five robot figures stand in a row, left to right, each increasing in articulation and instability. The first sits low: two legs splayed, back to the floor. The second rises: spine and two legs with knee joints, hip rotating in a z-shape reminiscent of a human stretch. Jeong controls each via a hand-held device. The third adds metal hips and abduction movement, its limbs testing the affordances of its frame. The fourth, detailed with bearing joints, allows twists of the legs and ground crawling; the fifth introduces a full torso and skull structure, heavily reinforced and balanced precariously. Jeong sits behind it, stabilising it, assisting its fragile articulation. The performance opens with robotic limbs in isolation, then accelerates into a choreography of care, adjustment, and mechanical malfunction. Jeong’s dry commentary, “sometimes I move them and it feels like they’re about to break,” she says, elicits audience laughter, then quiet attentiveness. Your gaze is drawn to wires, to hinge-joints, to the awkward fall and upright recovery of one figure. It becomes anatomical class, a stripping away of our bodily assumptions: how joints hold us upright, how ground-contact matters, how the body becomes machine and machine becomes body.
What stands out is the moment when Jeong stops pushing buttons and begins stabilising the robot. The shift from control interface to caregiver opens space for vulnerability. For an instance, the fifth robot collapses; Jeong catches a wire, reattaches a joint, coaxing the torso upright. That moment reframes the earlier spectacle; mechanical precision gives way to human fragility. The performance asks: What does autonomy mean when the machine needs our help? What does movement mean when every hinge can fail? And who holds responsibility for the body in motion?
Jeong’s lineage lies at the convergence of dance, object-theatre, machine aesthetics, and visual art. Where her work, such as Find, Select, Copy, and Paste, focuses on the bare body, Under Construction reinvests in the prosthetic, the artificial, the mechanical. In the broader field, the piece dialogues with dance, robotic theatre, puppetry, and art-machines, where the artist-as-coder and the performer-as-object converge. But Jeong shifts the emphasis: rather than control and perfection, she foregrounds failure, repair, contingency. This joins a current strand of post-digital performance that treats machines as partners rather than tools.
What lingers is care: the visible labour of holding a torso upright, of re-wiring a limb mid-performance, of sitting behind the machine rather than standing apart. Under Construction does not ask for seamless perfection. It rehearses breakdown and repair, inviting us to witness machines that lean on their maker. It reminds us that our bodies are machine-like, and our machines are still very much human. In that reflection, we see not just the robot, but ourselves. Jeong has made a work that feels urgent: not because it fears machines, but because it shows how much we are already entwined with them.
ACT is a three-day festival that brings together annually a hundred of participants and guests from around the world. The festival has four main sections: the pedagogical program, ACTmosfera encounters, the exhibition shows and the short play competition, open to companies willing to take part in the festival.
ACT launches a call for emerging artists on the international scene who have works of maximum 30 minutes. The festival is committed to companies that take risks in their proposals and new formats and scenic languages. ACT´s main goal is to promote and share the work of new creators with the audience, cultural managers, programmers and the media. To do so, the festival facilitates spaces for reflection and debate, besides a remarkable pedagogical program for the participating performers. ACT is not only a festival but also a performing arts fair attended by programmers from around the world.
The festival covers the accommodation of the company’s interpreters and the necessary technical team; breakfasts, lunches and dinners are also included in the invitation, as well as passes for all the activities that take place during the 3 days of the festival, including workshops, talks and all the programmed shows. The festival does not cover transport costs, they must assumed by the company or other institutions. Accommodation is offered in shared rooms with other artists.
COMPETITION. We are seeking artistic proposals of 30-minute maximum length by emerging creators: performance, dance, textual theatre, circus… any of the existing scenic languages. *Works exceeding duration on stage, may be penalized in the competition.
The selected proposals will be shown during the festival according to the program. ACT will have the rights to broadcast fragments of the works as well as the publication of images to promote the event.
An international and independent jury composed of performing arts professionals will grant the festival prizes during the closing ceremony:
ACT main award: 5.000 € for the production and presentation of a new project at the next edition of the festival.
Four mentions without economic compensation: Best interpreter, best direction, and two other mentions in the categories deemed appropriate by the jury.
How To Apply:
Complete the form(mandatory video or link to the video) before 20th of December 2025.
If you have any questions about the festival or the open call, contact us by phone to +34 944389096 or by email to act@bai-bai.net.
Guidelines and application form are available on our website and Instagram page.
These posts are not affiliated with Contemporary Performance Network, but are of interest to our community. We post these with the caveat to check the sources and research the opportunities or views expressed in the posts.
Fog rises before anything else. It bubbles from the ground, drifts in slow sheets across the stage, and hangs in midair like breath. In Gisèle Vienne’s Extra Life at the Holland Festival, the fog asserts itself as presence, reflecting the characters’ emotion and struggle. It moves through the performance as a living participant. It coils around the performers, obscures them, and releases them again. Through this shifting density, the audience enters a world of unsettled time, where trauma and tenderness appear to move at different speeds.
Vienne has developed a distinctive language of slow motion, disjunction, and suspended intensity. Working between choreography, theatre, and visual art, she constructs temporal architectures where gesture and light become psychological material. At the Holland Festival, Extra Life extends this vocabulary into new terrain. The piece turns toward the fragile persistence of bodies that remain after violation.
The fog asserts itself as presence, reflecting the characters’ emotion and struggle.
The performance begins in darkness. A group of teenagers gathers in a forest clearing on their way home from a choir competition. Gradually, we understand that something terrible has happened to them. The work unfolds in the aftermath, in the silence following language, where survival is physical rather than narrative.
The stage resembles a nocturnal landscape, at once natural and artificial. Layers of fog and smoke move through it, sometimes as a low ground mist, sometimes as thick vertical sheets. At certain points, the vapor swells in opaque clouds that engulf the dancers. Lasers slice through the air, tracing geometric lines that pass close to the bodies or enclose them within a shifting grid. These elements shape the action itself, defining its space of existence.
The performers move through a double structure of time. Their voices speak at normal speed, while their bodies move with extreme slowness. The visual and vocal tracks are never aligned. This separation creates a kind of temporal vertigo. Speech belongs to the present, while movement carries the weight of the past. Occasionally, a dancer slips or jerks, breaking the precision of the slowed rhythm. These small ruptures feel like tremors, the body remembering what it cannot articulate.
The performers move through a double structure of time. Speech belongs to the present, while movement carries the weight of the past.
The fog becomes an extension of the body’s emotional field. It hides and reveals, expands and contracts, as if responding to what the performers cannot say. Within it, they find temporary shelter, a camouflage that allows them to approach the unspeakable. Vienne treats the fog as a material of empathy. Through its density, the characters find each other and, for moments, themselves.
The choreography remains precise yet unresolvable. Figures advance and recede in near silence. Their proximity suggests recognition and estrangement at once. The forest becomes a site of shared memory and isolation. Caterina Barbieri’s score and Adrien Michel’s sound design vibrates beneath the action, a low sustained presence that thickens the air. The sound sustains emotion rather than directing it, holding the stage in a continuous state of trembling.
The performers’ work is extraordinary. They embody Vienne’s exacting physical language with precision and stamina, sustaining the extreme slowness while carrying the emotional weight of their characters. Every gesture, shift of focus, or intake of breath feels deliberate and charged. Their control is matched by vulnerability. The discipline required to maintain tempo and form over the span of the performance reveals a kind of endurance that is both physical and emotional. It is a feat of strength and feeling, a rigorous translation of trauma into movement that remains fully alive.
It is a feat of strength and feeling, a rigorous translation of trauma into movement that remains fully alive.
Vienne’s work has always interrogated the act of looking. In Extra Life, she transforms spectatorship into a condition of uncertainty. The fog reduces visibility, the slowness amplifies detail, and the lasers enforce distance. The audience watches yet never fully perceives. The experience mirrors the social blindness surrounding trauma, a collective inability to see what is already present.
There are moments when the performers approach one another and the illusion shifts. A hand touches a shoulder, a head turns toward a faint light, a breath becomes audible. These gestures are small but charged with the energy of endurance. They mark the return of life inside a landscape suspended between memory and disappearance.
Vienne has long used the languages of cinema, installation, and sculpture to expand the frame of dance. Here she pares them down. The scenography is elemental: air, light, sound, time. What remains is the act of persistence itself, the slow rebuilding of relation in the wake of harm.
When the fog finally begins to lift, the figures stand in the clearing. The light is thin. Resolution never arrives, only a shift in awareness. The work closes in a quiet recognition that survival continues as choreography, a repetition without conclusion.
concept Gisèle Vienne choreography Gisèle Vienne direction Gisèle Vienne scenography Gisèle Vienne in close collaboration with Adèle Haenel, Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick performance Adèle Haenel, Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick music Caterina Barbieri sound design Adrien Michel light design Yves Godin, Gisèle Vienne text Adèle Haenel, Theo Livesey, Katia Petrowick, Gisèle Vienne assistant Sophie Demeyer costumes Gisèle Vienne, Camille Queval, FrenchKissLA creation dolls Etienne Bideau-Rey, Nicolas Herlin technical coordination Samuel Dosière stage management Antoine Hordé sound manager Adrien Michel, Géraldine Foucault Voglimacci light manager Samuel Dosière, Iannis Japiot with thanks to Elsa Dorlin, Etienne Hunsinger, Sandra Lucbert, Romane Rivol, Anja Röttgerkamp, Sabrina Lonis, Maya Masse, Giovanna Rua, Lina Hinsky, Erik Houllier, Andrea Kerr tour Alma Office (Anne-Lise Gobin & Camille Queval) production Alma Office (Anne-Lise Gobin & Camille Queval) administration Cloé Haas, Clémentine Papandrea
