Performance & Residency (2026)

Unter Haut is a multi-media performance combining movement, live visuals driven by movement tracking, and generative sound. In this choreographic feedback network, each element impacts and responds to the others, so that the piece evolves as an autonomous system.

The piece explores the experience of shared corporeality, with two ‘creatures’ in an immersive environment. Each creature is a composite of two performers, who merge into an entity through sharing a new skin. These bodies and their environment blur the lines between the biological and the digital; they negotiate the ambivalence between joy and frustration as they navigate space, movement, and self-expression. In the setting of Dortmunder U, The creatures navigate the museum’s foyer, with floor-to-ceiling projections on one wall and quadriphonic sound, and the Immersive Room, a cubic space with floor and three walls of projections and a 32-channel surroudn sound system.

Unter Haut is a collaboration of Germany-based artists working in performance, creative computating, sound, and costuming. We developed the piece between Dortmunder U and Saalbau Witten, bringing together multiple NRW-based arts and research institutions. During our residency, we moved between these two institutions, working in a site-specific approach to co-develop choreography with live sound and live visuals. The performances were a part of Dortumund-based YU Festival, bringing together workshops, artworks, and presentations on digitality in the arts.

Costume Development: Multibodies

The costumes for Unter Haut — the ‘skins ' — were developed in iteration on the preceding project, “A Tuned Body.” The original concept of composite bodies manifested in two creatures: one is “B2B” and one is “Tube”. The two are designed to navigate their worlds in contradicting perceptions. One struggles with complete self-awareness, as two faces cannot quite observe each other, but has 360 degree vision and proprioception. The other is blindly self-absorbed, its world primarily internal; it can only navigate by sound, touch, and breath.

To create the silhouettes that merge two bodies into one, I began with sketches, and drafted the patterns entirely by hand, using measurements as the primary guides. The resulting garments were the B2B Robe, 4-Legged Pants, and the notorious Tube. The material is bamboo jersey, black tea dyed in my studio.

Workshops at Saalbau Witten

‘Tuning: a multi-media practice of worldbuilding’ — 28.09.2026, 18:00-20:00

Madelyn Byrd and Lou Croff Blake lead a __minute workshop sharing their co-developed tuning practice. What does it mean to envision and occupy our world as a collective? Tuning offers a somatic, creative medium for dissolving our learned sense of an isolated self, welcoming ecosystemic logic into the body. Participants will practice visioning, listening, sounding, and light movement to incorporate a felt-sense of multiplicity. Guiding the process, Blake and Byrd share their own journey through research and experimentation in ecological art.

‘Sensational Addicts’ — 30.09.2026, 19:00-21:00

In this two-hour movement workshop, Anna and Julie invite you to come and play with partnering elements to become one ore more bodies together. No prior experience needed, bring comfy clothes you can move it. We will work a lot with touch and explore skin and fascia as a sensory organ as well as negotiating weight and constraints in multi-body systems.