Rooted in themes of personal biography and social justice, Ishmael Houston-Jones directs an evening of experimental choreography through improvised scores. Featuring a cast of diverse invited local and international dance artists through an intensive festival creation process, Houston-Jones draws on over 50 years of dance, performance research, and life experience to employ various forms of movement and spoken improvisational techniques that deeply move and provoke. The work asks us to consider more fully what it means to be alive as it traverses the unknown.
Concept, choreography, dance: Ishmael Houston-Jones
in collaboration with the performers: Tis Aly, Skyla Miles, Yusa, Renan Manhães
Genre: Performance, Improvisation
Language: English
Duration: 60 min
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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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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The Emerging Change Dance Festival celebrates the work of queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and BIPoC dance artists (QTBIPoC) and creates an inclusive space in Berlin for movement, transformation and shared celebration.
Under the artistic direction of Nara Virgens and Makisig Akin, the festival explores the tension between Survival & Pleasure. It examines how we survive and care for one another whilst simultaneously creating spaces for joy, pleasure, desire and shared experiences. A diverse programme of performances, workshops, residencies, community dialogues and celebrations brings together renowned international artists with emerging talents from Berlin.
Emerging Change sees dance as a place of encounter, resistance, joy and change. Survival & Pleasure thus become physical and collective practices: about persevering and carrying on, but also about celebrating, enjoying, desiring and being together. The festival invites you to come together, exchange ideas, forge new connections and celebrate spaces together.
More information about the festival emergingchange.org
The festival takes place in cooperation with DOCK ART Theater, Uferstudios e.V., Tanzfabrik Bühne, Tanzfabrik Schule, Karada House and the Prinzessinnengarten.