Ida Daniel
Ida Daniel was born in Sofia, Bulgaria where she is presently based. She holds MA in Directing for Drama Theatre from New Bulgarian University, BA in English and American Studies from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” and has graduated the National Lyceum for Ancient Languages and Cultures.
In 2011 she started “The Mighty Mighty Pressure Cooker – an organization for pressure-driven contemporary performing arts”, which has become the main producer of her recent projects. Some of them are “No Movement No Sound” – a performance experiment on the interdependence of breathing, movement and light; “Eating the Apple” – a study of self-generated dramaturgy; “Sofia in your ears” – mobile audio installation. The performance “Ing-Time” is her recent research collaboration on perceiving time and space based on a new Bulgarian text for stage by poet Radoslav Chichev with new-music composers, architects, architecture-students and performers, performed in a non-theatrical space.
In 2009 she was part of the founding group of ACT – Association for Independent Performing Arts in Bulgaria and served as its first chairperson until 2012. She is still active in cultural policy advocacy for the Independent Contemporary Art Scene in Bulgaria taking part in dialogues with institutions, public debates and other activist events.
Kristóf Farkas
Kristóf Farkas, born in 1989 is a Hungarian dance writer regularly publishing reviews in online and print magazines on performing arts. He is also a freelance actor and dancer.
He graduated as an actor in 2011 and studied classical ballet and contemporary dance on the Hungarian Dance Academy. He participated in dance workshops among others with Wim Vandekeybus, Raza Hammad, Neel Verdorn, Uri Shafir etc. After finishing his BA in Hungarian Literature and Theatre Sciences in 2014, he is now doing his masters in Literary and Cultural Sciences. He also makes literary translations, writes poems and prose, he blogs (sinonnoussommes.tumblr.com).
In 2015, he was awarded the Viktor Fülöp Scholarship (the most prestigious state-funded scholarship for dance writers in Hungary). As a member of the Critics’ Self-Educating Workshop (KÖM) by L1 Association – a non-profit umbrella organization of independent Hungarian artists – he regularly participates on festivals in Europe, discussing performances with fellow critics and writing reviews for their blog (http://dancescript.blogspot.com) in English. His goal is to give an up to date, comprehensive and comparative view on contemporary European performing arts through his critics and essays and publish a bilingual monography of these (in English and Hungarian).
Besides this, his research project is examining the possibilities of using translation studies, literary theories (e.g. poetics) and poetology in dance writing as well as looking at dance as a written text – based on Derrida’s theory – written in/on the body.
Shir Hacham
Shir Hacham is a dance writer and researcher. She is a graduate student at the philosophy department at Tel Aviv University, and also is a teaching assistant there. Shir was the dance correspondent of “Haaretz” Israeli daily newspaper from 2012 and 2014, and continues her research, discursive and dramaturgic work in Israel today. Her first academic publishing co-authored with Ido Feder was published in 2013 on TkH journal, dealing with Ohad Naharin’s dance works and movement-language from a aesthetico-political perspective.
Aisling Marks
Aisling Marks studied English literature at the University of Birmingham, UK, and Gender Studies at Utrecht University. She is currently writing her MA thesis in the Theatre Studies program of Utrecht University, examining contemporary notions of critical art and performance, public space and commonist aesthetics. She has co-designed a 3rd-year BA course, ‘City as Stage’ in the Utrecht University Theatre Studies department, and is working with independent theatre-maker Edit Kaldor as a researcher and dramaturg. She has written on topics including -but not limited to- music, feminism, Marxism, urbanism and squatting, and is collaborating with (Un)Usual Business and Casco (Office for Art, Design and Theory) in an ongoing research project on the Commons and alternative economies.
Stina Nyberg
Stina Nyberg lives in Sweden where she makes and performs choreography. Her choreographic practice is related to the possibility to through conviction and illusion create new systems of logic in order to be able to construct the world differently, and act accordingly. Her departure point is always a feminist approach to the body; its social and political construction and ability to move. Often working in collaboration with others – moving in between independent theatres, state institutions, art galleries and the music scene – she creates a work method specific to every situation, including how we work into what we work with.
Nyberg is the choreographer of the live concert Shaking the Habitual by the Swedish band The Knife and is also performing in the show which has been touring in Europe and US throughout 2013-2014. Nyberg’s latest commission is a work for the Cullberg Ballet titled Tones & Bones (2014). Both works mentioned above follows a series of works on the non-hierarchical relation between the performance of sound and movement, such as The Way Sounds Attack (2010), Loudspeaking (2011), Orkestern (2012) and the latest work Splendour (2014) which is touring in 2015. The solo Horrible Mixtures (2014), made in collaboration with Andros Zins-Browne, is a choreographic seance departing from a sceptics interest in spirituality. Nyberg have for several years collaborated with the choreographers Amanda Apetrea, Nadja Hjorton, Halla Ólafsdóttir and Zoë Poluch, investigating dance history from a feminist perspective.
Livia Andrea Piazza
Livia Andrea Piazza (born in 1986 in Milan) is a researcher and practitioner in performing arts. In 2015 she submitted her PhD dissertation at the faculty of Cultural Sciences at the University of Lüneburg. The work focuses on the concept of new, its meaning and production in contemporary performing arts practice under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism. Since her graduation in Economics and Management of Art and Culture (M.Sc.), she engages with experimental performing arts, combining theory and practice in the theatre of the present in order to reflect and imagine the present at large. She worked in festival’s organisation (International festival of Santarcangelo) and recently, she started working as dramaturge with young artists. Since 2014 she is part of Aleppo (Brussels), A Laboratory for Experiments in Performance and Politics, which intercepts and explores urgent questions on the premises of taking art not as an object but as a subject of reflection. She engages also in editorial projects within performing arts institutions and with Plateau, a discursive platform for performing arts in Hamburg, that aims at producing texts while reflecting on critical writing’s modalities and scope. Her current concerns are grounded in these individual and collective forms of research and practice and regard the reconceptualization of the new and the future within late capitalism; the concept of rule and the paradoxes it entails; the possibility of imagining new institutions in performing arts and the potential of readdressing the relationship between performance and politics.
Ana Schnabl
Ana Schnabl studied philosophy and literary theory. She writes critically about contemporary dance and literature and very often about issues and paralysis of criticism itself. Her work is published in major Slovene art publications and in Dnevnik newspaper, where she is active also as a cultural journalist. Her major focus in dance criticism is the development of a dance discourse that would transcend strictly local or national paradigms and would therefore separate from an already established theatre discourse. Until 2011 she was active as a performer and author and received the Nomad Dance Academy scholarship in 2009.
In literary criticism she often analyzes the unstable relationship between the theoretical apparatus and the experiental level of reading, so theory vs./with pleasure, to put is simply. Living and working in the midst of two art discourses, she also finds time to write prose and is expecting her debut short story collection under the title Issued without receipt to be published in 2016. Currently she is drafting a novel, disregarding the fact that there are millions of novels in the world already.
