Carlos Pons Guerra

DeNada Dance Theatre

Working in ballet, contemporary dance and theatre, and always with adoration for kitsch, melodrama and high camp, Carlos creates work that explores gender, cultural and sexual identity, trying to entertain, move and provoke thought through emotionally motivated movement, narrative and theatricality.

Carlos Pons Guerra, who has created four internationally touring productions for the company, DeNada takes a unique place in the UK dance scene as an ensemble representing Hispanic culture as well as calling for LGBTQ+ and gender equality.

What will you be working on as part of your residency?

“I will be developing a new work that explores the relationship between British tourists and Spanish beaches- something I’ve experienced from a young age, coming from Gran Canaria! I am really interested in that cross-cultural encounter between people in a place where we are almost naked as is the beach.”

Shane Shambhu

Altered Skin

The company blends together all my performance experiences including Bharatanatyam, contemporary dance, theatre, writing and a wide range of other artistic disciplines. The company has grown and discovered its unique brand of humour and Indian-dance derived physical theatre merging art forms and cultures from global perspectives to entertain, educate and empower.

What will you be working on as part of your residency?

I am exploring the translation of Bharatanatyam to non-Bharatanatyam trained bodies leading to an authentic hybridised movement language furthering my Bharatanatyam-derived physical theatre language. Through choreographic explorations driven by the emotional and narrative aspects of Bharatanatyam, my research will try and capture the dramatic content within the themes of my new work ‘Invisible Lines’.

Roberta Jean

Roberta trained as a dancer at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance and then widened her research field to explore historical and international performance practice, completing an MA in Performance Making at Goldsmiths.  Her choreography is centred around poetics and is often underpinned by anthropological research.  Roberta was nominated for the Total Theatre Dance Award in 2018. She is a 2019 finalist at Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Screen.dance and at New Renaissance Film Festival.

What will you be working on as part of your residency?

Working with a team of dancers, artists, creative technologists, and psychologists, I will explore cross-disciplinary artistic practice in an attempt to translate certain aspects of psychedelic therapy. Scientists and psychologists across the world are making the case for psychedelics to be legalised in controlled settings and medicinal contexts to enable us to treat depression, addiction, trauma, PTSD, and fear of death in relation to the end of life care.

Johnny Autin

Autin Dance Theatre

An established Dance Artist & Choreographer based in Birmingham (UK), working internationally as a performer and choreographer. I am the Creative Director of award-winning Autin Dance Theatre (est. 2013) a collaborative and project-based organisation producing engaging artistic performances that provide an extensive learning and participation programme. My choreographic process is always influenced by socio-political statements and engaged towards positive, empowering and inspiring messages to our audiences.

What will you be working on as part of your residency?

“I am interested in researching and developing an ambitious site-specific piece with a large puppet operated by 5 puppeteers and one dancer. The idea is to choreograph a larger–than–life ‘pas de deux’ and to choreograph this duet as if they were both real-life contemporary dancers.”