Fierce Jams 03: Highbury Hall

Alina Arshi + Kairaan Kika

Alina Arshi is a Lausanne-based artist working across dance, choreography, and research.

Aliaskar Abarkas

Aliaskar Abarkas is an Iranian artist based in London.

Rooted in alternative and communal art education, his practice stages choreographic encounters that move from individual elements into collective expression. Often in dialogue with historical sources, Abarkas builds collaborative frameworks that invite participants to interpret and activate inherited scores through music, exhibition, and performance making.

Shannon Cochrane + Dickie Beau

Shannon Cochrane is a Canadian performance artist, curator and writer. She holds a Honours Bachelor of Interpretation (American Sign Language–English) from George Brown Polytechnic, Toronto. Her performance work has been presented in museums, galleries, festivals and in all kinds of events across Canada and internationally in 25 countries. Shannon’s performance practice is primarily concerned with illustrating and working through the tensions between process and strategy, context and perception, and authorship and repetition. Recent proclivities include language acquisition, call-backs, dreams, swan songs and performers who have died on stage.

A versatile actor of stage and screen, Dickie Beau is also known for creating his own distinctive body of work through his long-form lip sync shows, built from recorded interviews and archive material. He is currently under commission to write a new play for Hampstead Theatre, and works as a coach and teacher with actors, artists and students.

Josefina Cerda

Josefina Cerda is a performance artist, sound designer, and s3x w0rker-domin4trix. Her work explores the relationship between body, sexu4lity, sound, and fantasy, addressing pleasure, love, and power dynamics through a critical and sensorial approach.

Her practice includes NSFW content and the exploration of domination and BDSM in intimate, professional, and performative contexts. She is currently a producer and associate artist at Fundación Cuerpo Sur, and co-directs the porn magazine Vieja Verde.

Emergency Chorus

Emergency Chorus is the collaboration between Ben Kulvichit (he/him) and Clara Potter-Sweet (they/them). Since 2016, they have created performance that spans experimental theatre, Live Art, dance and social practice (‘Beguiling and enchanting work’ – The Guardian). Their ongoing preoccupations include the relationships between ecology, capitalism and technology, and ways of approaching the future. In their work, they value complexity, strangeness, playfulness, intimacy and ambiguity. 

They have presented work at venues and organisations including Battersea Arts Centre, Cambridge Junction, Arnolfini, Old Diorama Arts Centre and Chisenhale Dance Space. They were winners of the 2025 Untapped Award. Ben and Clara live in Bristol and are members of Interval artist collective.

Kirstin Halliday

Valentina Kappes
Valentina Kappes is a dancer, teacher, and graphic activist. Self-taught, her work as a performing artist explores radical imagination, ways of inhabiting the world collectively and archives. As a teacher, she shares participatory and undisciplined methodologies, stimulating overlaps between the body, graphics and dance. Interested in working with communities, she has developed strong ties to southern Chile through the Valdivia Centre for Performing Arts Experimentation. She currently works in the south, integrating spaces for collaborative management and creation. She is part of the dissident creative duo Las Especulativas and an active member of the cultural cooperative Exploratorio de artes y oficios.

Autumn Knight

Autumn Knight is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist who works with performance, installation, video, and text. Drawing on her training in theatre and the psychology of group dynamics, Knight makes performances that reshape perceptions of race, gender, and authority. 

Laura Lulika

Based in Leeds, UK, Laura Lulika is an artist whose experiences of being a disabled queer neurodivergent and working-class parent shapes their creative practice. When released from periods of being bed/house-bound, Lulika can usually be found sat on their stoop or gardening in their front yard, developing their medicinal garden, often surrounded by several curious neighbourhood kids. 

Samra Mayanja

Samra Mayanja is an artist-writer working across performance and installation. Her practice considers the illegibility of the body and the absurdist impulse to seek what is irretrievably lost. A continuously hopeful but seemingly futile act of searching runs through her work.

Gusta Mara

Gusta Mara an Angamudthi and Atembiya man from the tip of Cape York Queensland and a Goba, Argun, Wagadagam and Kaurareg man from the Inner and Western islands of the Torres Strait. An Indigenous artist and creator, proud and committed to representing my culture on an eclectic range of projects and educational programs. His career to this date has seen him touring extensively around Australia, regionally, nationally, and internationally including in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, facilitating community engagement, cultural exchange and specialised workshops. He has worked across diverse projects, varying in scale and artform and work collaboratively with Directors and Choreographers to deliver their vision, whilst being committed to excellence. Gusta has also become a leader in the ballroom scene where he co-created the Indigenous All-Stahz Ball where they have made their mission to bring and inspire more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into the ballroom scene in so-called Australia. This ball was recognised and produced other ballroom events and performances.

Jessie McLaughlin

Jessie McLaughlin is an artist/writer/researcher from London, now based between London and Birmingham. Jessie likes to read books and poetry, and at the moment is most interested in SEX, PAIN, CLASS and MUSIC.

Michelangelo Miccolis

Michelangelo Miccolis, born in 1981 in Mexico City, is an artist and performer based between Brussels and Mexico City, with a multidisciplinary practice spanning writing, production, and curation. Founder and curator of IMMATERIAL, an annual performance program at Feria Material, Mexico City (since 2017). Former guest curator at Cabaret Voltaire (2017–19) and curator at Shedhalle (2020–2025), Zurich. Frequent collaborator with leading artists and institutions worldwide, including Tate Modern, La Biennale di Venezia, Museo Reina Sofía, and more.

Francesca Millican-Slater

Francesca Millican-Slater is an artist working in theatre, performance and audio. She also sit pets. Fran makes work in response to histories of place, people, nature, objects and how stories are collected and told. Her shows have been co-produced and commissioned by Birmingham Rep, New Vic Stoke, Duckie & Fierce Festival (Princess Promenade) and she has been artist in residence at The National Waterways Museum and Warwickshire Archives. Her audio works include podcast Stories to Tell in the Middle of the Night (strange stories for sleepless nights) and commissions for Coventry City of Culture and The National Trust. She’s usually trying to get wet in a pool, pond or puddle.

Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome

Of English-Chilean descent, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome is a London-based artist, choreographer, dancer and researcher creating immersive performances and workshops. Through somatic practice and her process driven approach, she explores the potentials of solo and collective embodied power and the temporary building of micro-communities. Collaboration is key, crafting ecologies of liveness, risk, care, and access. Her work shifts perspectives, rippling between human and more-than-human space-time. Approaching dance and voice through the deep poetics of the body and the contradictions of how to be in the world.

Heidi Rustgaard

Heidi trained as a dancer and holds an MRes (Distinction) in Advanced Practices from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently part of the artist cohort at Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells East (2024–26), directed by Martin Hargreaves, where she continues her queering strategy of working off-score and developing a series of works that explore a single note as choreographic material.

Her current work, Slow Riffs: Five Stages of Yes, invites 3–5 guitarists to queer the electric guitar by tuning all strings to a single note, reframing masculine-coded ideas of virtuosity and dominance. Unfolding as a spatial landscape of sculptural bodies and resonating sound, the piece condenses into an extended state of collective vibration, exploring sound as both physical and affective material. Co-produced by Rose Choreographic School, Sadler’s Wells, and Fest en Fest (UK); Høstscena Ålesund, RAS Sandnes, and Rosendal Teater Trondheim (NO); and Köttinspektionen Uppsala (SE).

Pierre Piton

P. Piton is a French choreographer and performer based between Stockholm and Zürich. They studied dance and choreography at the National Conservatory of Paris and La Manufacture Lausanne. Since 2019, P. has been working within the collective The Field, a space dedicated to non-hierarchical and collaborative choreographic practices, which has invited guest choreographers such as Simone Aughterlony, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Isabel Lewis, and Meg Stuart into dialogue. Alongside this work, P. co-founded La PP with Romane Peytavin, developing works rooted in structured improvisation, including Dédicace and Farewell Body. In 2022, their association Snakes & Stones presented the multi-sensory performance Open/Closed at La Bâtie Geneva, Tanzmesse Düsseldorf, June Events Paris, and the Swiss Dance Days among other venues. P. is currently pursuing a master’s degree in choreography at the Stockholm University of the Arts.

GOON is an immersive trio performance researched and performed by Sepideh Khodarahmi, Nica Roses, and P. Piton. Through a choreographic lens, the work invites audiences into an intimate encounter with the ways pleasure is perceived, constructed, and pursued.

Martin Soria

Martín Soria is a creator and performer from northern Argentina. He has been researching movement in Salta since 2014, where heNOATILCARAd the interdisciplinary group Cuerpes Movimiento Experimental. His work explores art, territory, gender and technology, approaching them from a dissident perspective. He proposes a narrative outside of large centralised productions, generating links with different artists and disciplines in northern Argentina. His first solo creation, “MACHITO”, was presented as a WIP in NOATILCARA (Jujuy, Argentina), Museo de Bellas Artes Salta, Museo del Devenir (Buenos Aires), CECREA (Castro, Chile), as part of the AVANZADA SUR residency programme, in the VENTANA AL SUR Festival (Santiago, Chile), Santarcangelo Festival (Italy) and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel Festival (Switzerland).

Sym Stellium + Victoria Gray

Sym Stellium is a live artist, facilitator, holistic support worker & ritualist based in Birmingham. The exploration of connection, autonomy and liberation on micro & macro levels sits at the core of its practice. Its work primarily revolves around: healing justice, bodily autonomy, ritual & intuition and distorting notions of time.

Using a combination of movement, soundscapes, chanting and meditative practices – Sym attempts to create embodied expressions of the ethereal and break down internalised colonial belief systems.

Sym has performed in spaces such as Humber Street gallery, Mimosa House, Eastside Projects, Graves Gallery and St Ninian’s Church for Glasgow BUZZCUT festival.

Victoria Gray [Newcastle, 1982] is an artist and artist-mentor. She has presented solo performance work throughout the UK, Europe, USA and Canada. Her work moves across action, video, writing, and sound, and explores experiences of psychological flexibility, neuroqueerness, and self-fragmentation.

Stone Motherless Cold

Stone Motherless Cold (they/re) is an Arrernte gem based in Narrm—smooth and sensual, bold and graphic, a crystalline being posing as human. A performer, painter, producer and DJ, Stone works through multi disciplinary projects,  creating spaces to highlight and centre Blak queer communities. Exploring Blak futurism, gender and sexuality, sovereignty and Country through queer fantastical scenes, dreaming of distant and forgotten futures that the land remembers. They are in the Motherless Collective, a Victorian NAIDOC LGBTQIA+ 2019 title winner, and 1st Runner-Up Miss First Nations 2021 (Queens – The Ultimate Drag Crown). They have appeared in major works across Midsumma, YIRRAMBOI festival, Melbourne Fringe, and beyond, including Dis Rupt, The Fae, Alluvium and 3 Blak Ravers. 

Aby Watson
Dr. Aby Watson is a neuroqueer artist, choreographer, performer, academic & activist based in Glasgow. Aby’s work is polymorphic – shifting fluidly across contemporary performance and knowledge exchange, with a focus on radical neurodiversity. With special interests in neuroqueering, stimming, sensuality, and consciousness, her playful, stimulating choreographic sensibility explores non-neuronormative potentials through rhythm, repetition, ritual, and togetherness.

Wet Mess in collaboration with Naissa Bjorn

Wet Mess is a wet mess, horny for your confusion. Let it all out and guess again at the insecure balding white man/pussy prince/alien baby. Have a lollygag, think about your fantasy flesh suits, call me sweet prince, and remember Roger in a robe. Choose to make some silly campy decisions, with all the hairy thems and dykey men. Mainly thinking about cunnilingus cunni cunni lingus but also being more unknown than known. All I really wanna do is strip for the stripper and drive her home with the dogs.