Ishmael Houston-Jones’s improvised dance and text works have been performed worldwide. He has received three “Bessie” Awards for collaborations with writer Dennis Cooper, choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Fred Holland and composers Chris Cochrane and Nick Hallett. Houston-Jones curated “Platform 2012: Parallels” which centered choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism, and co-curated with Will Rawls “Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now.”
@ishmaelhoustonjones
Skyla Miles is a dancer and writer interested in proximity in relation to time space and identity as an unspoken presence and theme in all of the work that she does. Improvisation as a means of creating the conditions for a state to arise is the basis of all that she does. Skyla is particularly interested in the many ways to reckon with happenings in a lifetime and how these can become vehicles for creative expression.
@skyylaaaa_
Yusa is a queer interdisciplinary artist and researcher from Argentina. She works between rural France and Berlin. Her practice explores the body as a social, ecological, and relational tissue where affective forces converge. They moves across different artistic languages and fields like dance, ceramics and poetry. Yusa works from a situated perspective searching ways to connect geo-territorial realities, care and social change, weaving through sensitivity, micro-politics, and poetics. She has performed in works by mayfield brooks, Aïsha Konaté, The Love Makers Company, and Maya Ponce.
@yusa.min
Renan Manhães is a Berlin-based artist, creative, and cultural worker originally from Brazil. Renan has built an international career across performance, choreography, video, and music, collaborating with institutions such as the Goethe-Institut, the Royal Ballet, the Venice Biennale, and the Berlinale. Alongside an artistic practice, Renan has also developed projects in creative facilitation, brand-building, and artist advocacy, always with a strong focus on access, collaboration, and sustainable cultural work interwoven with politics and economics. The outcome of these practices is Opportuning (CCL), an initiative on technology and art labour based in Berlin.
@renan_manhaes
Tis Aly is a Berlin-based artist originally from Terra Pindorama (Brazil) whose work unfolds across choreography, performance, installation, sound, and collective research. Moving between theatres, public space, and site-responsive environments, Aly develops expanded choreographic formats that question how bodies gather, remember, listen, and produce forms of collective knowledge. Their practice positions choreography not primarily as the composition of movement, but as a relational technology capable of reorganising social, spatial and affective infrastructures.
@tisaaly
Auro Orso is a Berlin-based dancer, choreographer and performer who identifies as Trans and Two-Spirit. A graduate of HZT Berlin, they have presented work at HAU, Sophiensæle and Ballhaus Naunynstraße, and internationally at Crazinist Artist Studio in Ghana, Festival Afro-Prieto-Centrado in Mexico and ImPulsTanz in Austria. Most recently, they performed at the Venice Biennale in Verena Melgarejo Weinandt’s Weaving Connections.
Rooted in their lived experience as a racialized person, political activism and engagement with Indigenous knowledge, Auro’s practice explores decolonial approaches to everyday life, questioning Western and colonial ideas of universality, binaries and propriety. Through performance, workshops and community-based projects, they foster care, healing and collective imagination within Queer and BIPoC communities. Their research draws on somatics, perreo, consent and physical theatre, engaging themes of care, Indigenous futurism and imaginative gender riots. Their solo PERREO ENTRE LOS MUNDOS premiered at Tanztage Berlin in 2025.
Tiran Willemse is an interdisciplinary collaborative artist working in the field of dance, theater, video and performance with Trajal Harrell, Jerome Bel, Ligia Lewis, Wu-Tsang (moved by the motion), Deborah Hay, Eszter Salamon, Meg Stuart and Andros Zins-Browne. Willemse's practice centers on the interrogation of presence and absence in the performance of identity, he endeavors to foster new desires in the imagination through a visceral experience. His work has been presented by Palais de Tokyo Paris, Gesseneralle, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne Museum Macro Rome, Impulstanz Wien, Santarcangelo Festival Italy, Kunsthaus Baselland, Tanzquartier Wien, Swiss Institute New York and Arsenic Lausanne. Willemse won the Swiss performance prize 2023 and lives and works in Zurich and Berlin.
@tiranwillemse
Ishmael Houston-Jones’s improvised dance and text works have been performed worldwide. He has received three “Bessie” Awards for collaborations with writer Dennis Cooper, choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Fred Holland and composers Chris Cochrane and Nick Hallett. Houston-Jones curated “Platform 2012: Parallels” which centered choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism, and co-curated with Will Rawls “Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now.
@ishmaelhoustonjones
Makisig Akin (they/them) and Anya Cloud (she/they) love each other. They have been collaborating and imagining together for 15 years. As queer dance artists/activists/educators their work is deeply rooted in the politics of the body and intersectional identity, indebtedness to ancestors and descendants, love, inventing new strategies for being intimately together, and cultivating radical aliveness. Makisig is originally from the Philippines and Anya is originally from Alaska. They co-direct The Love Makers Company and are based between Berlin and Colorado. They are currently funded by NEFA/National Dance Project to create and tour their new work Post-Failure Potentials, which will premiere in 2027. Their work We Are (nothing) Everything is touring internationally. They regularly co-teach together internationally including at Tanzfabrik Berlin Schüle, ImPulsTanz, Being Touch, Wainsgate Dances, and Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation, among others.
@makisigakin @anya.cloud
Fountain Fantasy is part of Magic Dyke* a queer slinta (sapphic,lesbian, intersex, non binary, trans, asexual) masculine stripping group. Using dance to express their gender beyond the binary. Taking their dance influence from acrobatic, martial arts, pole dance, and floor work. For Fountain dance is something empowering and helps reclaim and find beauty outside of the mainstream.
Sointu Pere is an Afro-Finnish dancer, performer and facilitator based in Berlin. Their movement practice is rooted in improvisation, play, and somatic approaches. Navigating belonging, they use movement to connect and transform. They co-host queer BIPOC movement and music improvisation sessions drawing from drag to explore the in-betweens of being. As a space holder, they cultivate movement spaces that honor multiple embodied knowledge, centering collaborative creation and collective care.
@sointupere
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