Kollektiv ZOO emerged from the master's programme in scenic research at the Ruhr University Bochum and has been realising works at the interdisciplinary border of choreography, performance and installation since 2015. Anja Plonka, Constantin Leonhard and Jens Eike Krüger compose their heterogeneous and aesthetic practices into full-length happenings and events. Since 2015, Kollektiv ZOO has been engaged in the performative negotiation of everyday bodies with furniture.

We work with documentary, installation and choreographic means. We experiment with contrary aesthetics and conventions, seek radical, poetic and quiet contradiction within our works in order to renegotiate the relationship between political bodies, places and narratives and use it to create new spaces. It is our concern to create experiences in which every body present becomes part of a unique happening. Discourse collides with the aesthetics of the everyday, the casual or the brute.

Website:
www.kollektiv-zoo.de

Elsa Artmann and Samuel Duvoisin explore ways of collective composition in a transfer between dance and painting. With their approach, which uses interaction with each other as a central compositional impulse, they look at concepts of community that shape our political climate - especially small families and neighborhoods. They use their mutual society - in regular cooperation with other artists of different media - as a place for questioning personal concepts and experiences of family, origin and neighbourhood. Media of her work are painting, performative/theatrical formats and the book. They received their training at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig and the Zentrum für Zeitgenössischen Tanz Köln. Works have been shown at the Neue Kunstforum Köln, the Tanzhaus NRW, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig and the workshop programme of the Lofft Theater Leipzig.

Website:
www.artmannduvoisin.de

Özlem Alkis works as a choreographer and performer within genre-crossing formats and presents her works in the manner of stage plays, video presentations and installations. She was born in Istanbul and currently resides in Cologne. In 2003, she participated in the study framework of the ex.e.r.ce programme at the Centre Choréographique National de Montpellier and subsequently took part in the choreographic research project essais at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine-Angers. She is one of the founders of the Istanbul Amber Art and Technology Festival and served as its co-director until 2012. Also in 2012, she managed Special Issue European Project’s Istanbul version which supports the development of discursive approaches in the performing arts. In 2012, she enrolled in the master’s degree programme dance agency at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln (Cologne University of Music). She received a stipend from the Berlin Academy of Arts in 2015 and has been a member of Cologne artists’ collective “ehrenfeldstudios” since.

Website:
www.ozlemalkis.com

Cuban-born Julio César Iglesias Ungo is a choreographer, director and dancer. He studied contemporary dance at the National Dance Academy Cuba, at the Escuela Nacional de Artes La Habana, and was a member of the national dance company. As a dancer, he worked with numerous international companies throughout Europe, Cuba and Latin America, among them Samir Akika/Unusual Symptoms, La Intrusa/Damián Muñoz Danza and, most recently, “Ultima Vez” by renowned Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus. As a choreographer, among other things, he devised pieces for Renegade Theatre and the Schauspielhaus Bochum and won a commission for the Nederlands Dans Theater. His dynamic dancing style, marked by a high share of physicalness and an aesthetic steeped in experimental dance theatre, is also echoed in his choreographies.