Shortlist 2021

Alex Baczynski-JENKINS (PL/UK)

Artist and choreographer Alex Baczynski-Jenkins engages with queer affect, embodiment and relationality.
Through gesture, collectivity, touch and sensuality, his practice unfolds structures and politics of desire.

Relationality is present in the dialogical ways in which the work is developed and performed as well as in the materials and interdependent poetics it invokes. This includes tracing relations between sensation and sociality, embodied expression and alienation, the textures of everyday experience, the utopian and latent queer archives. He approaches choreography as a way of reflecting on the matter of feeling, perception and collective emergence, while producing other ways of experiencing memory, time and change. He is co-founder of Kem, a Warsaw based queer feminist collective focused on choreography, performance and sound at the interface with social practice. Through various experimental formats and community building, Kem engages in critical intimacy and queer pleasure.

KEYON GASKIN (US)

keyon gaskin prefers not to contextualize with their credentials.

Florentina holzinger (AT)

Florentina Holzinger’s dance pieces are driven by the notion of identity, sexual and physical transgression. Drawing inspiration as much from Viennese Actionism, body art and bodybuilding as from classical ballet, cabaret and circus; she deconstructs, performance after performance, the very definition of femininity.

Florentina studied choreography at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) at the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten. Her Diploma solo work Silk was awarded the Prix Jardin d’Europe at the lmPulsTanz Festival 2012. She collaborated with Vincent Riebeek for a trilogy of pieces, Kein Applaus für Scheiße, Spirit, and Wellness followed by Schoenheitsabend- Tänze des Grauens und der Extase (2011-2015). Her second solo work premiered in 2015 – Recovery is an experimental consideration on a traumatic stage accident she had suffered and critically explores various kinds of female representation as well as the potential of female corporality.

In her latest works she continued dissecting the narratives of ballet: first with Apollon (2017), a hack on Balanchines’s 1920s Apollon Musagete, followed by TANZ, an action ballet that reflects on tradition and narrative departing from the romantic ballet La Sylphide. Her latest work Etude for an Emergency, is a stunt opera developed with a cast of opera singers and stunt actresses – a musical composition for 10 bodies and a car. In 2020 TANZ was awarded for “Best Performance of the Year” by Theater Heute and with the NESTROY Price for best direction.

Along her stage works Florentina is regularly teaching movement classes and offers trainings.

Her work is intrinsically linked with the aim of exploring modes of embodiment and the development of practices to support a physical life in action. Her practice is heavily informed by martial arts, functional and somatic movement practices as well as everything dance.

narcissister (US)

Narcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. Wearing mask and merkin, she works at the intersection of contemporary dance, visual art, and activism. She actively integrates her prior experience as a professional dancer and commercial artist with her art practice in a range of media including live performance, collage, sculpture, video, film, and experimental music. She has presented work worldwide at festivals, nightclubs, museums, and galleries.

Her art video “Vaseline” won Best Use of a Sex Toy at The Good Vibrations Erotic Film Festival. In 2013 she received a Bessie Award nomination for the theatrical performance of “Organ Player” and in 2015 she received Creative Capital and United States Artists Awards. Interested in troubling the popular entertainment and experimental art divide, she appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2011. Her first feature film “Narcissister Organ Player” premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2018; the European premiere was at the Locarno International Film Festival. Also in 2018 she had a solo exhibition at Participant Inc. gallery in New York.

She is a Sundance Theatre Lab 2018 Fellow for the development of a new evening length performance commissioned by the Soho Rep in New York. She was nominated for the ArtPace Residency in San Antonio, Texas in Summer 2019 and her activist short art film “Narcissister Breast Work” premiered at Sundance 2020.