To support younger and mid-career artists in developing technical aspects of their work, A Two Dogs Company offers a number of residencies every year. The aim is to combine the development of technical elements (machines, light installations, sound, projection, etc.) with dramaturgical and content related conversations. We provide the material, machines and space needed in the studio and guide where necessary.
Each residency runs for one year. Technical developments cannot easily be limited in time, as in a "regular" residency. A technical element is made and tested, and then the artist usually goes back to the drawing board, changes something, tests again, etc. until finally a prototype emerges. Then another "plug-and-play" version must be made, and so on. By being able to work with technical tests and applications early in the creation process, technology can be more substantively integrated into the performance, installation or choreography.
The residencies are aimed at artists for whom this support represents an opportunity to engage more substantively and efficiently with new media and technology. Our 'residency partners' are workspacebrussels, KWP - Kunstenwerkplaats, Grand Theatre Groningen and Bâtard festival.
Interested?
We welcome 2-3 residents per year.
Send us a dossier with your proposal and motivation why you would like a technical-dramaturgical residency at A Two Dogs Company.
contact@atdc.be
We are pleased to announce the first project of our iMAL x A Two Dogs Company residency. For the STAGES residency, a jury, composed of members of A Two Dogs Company and iMAL selected the proposal of Bárbara C. Branco.
Bárbara C. Branco her project, temporarily titled Enfado, is inspired by a longing for the sea, that she will try to evoke through a performance incorporating a series of low-tech installations. « Sprinkled with hints of climate crisis fear, love for ecology and self-conscious and self-deprecating humour », Bárbara wants « to bring the Portuguese coast to iMAL ».
A Two Dogs Company noted that they appreciate how Enfado is « an authentic artistic gesture, with a real necessity behind it ». Together, we think that her proposal will make optimal use of the spaces, possibilities and knowledge of both organisations. We look forward to welcoming Bárbara and lending our support to her ideas!
Mooni Van Tichel is a dancer, performer and maker. Discovering dance through hiphop, house and breaking has shaped her interests and ways of relating to movement. She later came across contemporary dance, which led her to P.A.R.T.S., where she graduated from the Training Cycle in 2019 and from STUDIOS in 2021. Currently, she has resumed her original dance training, performs for other artists and creates her own work.
As a maker, Mooni often starts from feminist theory, science fiction aesthetics and narratives, and self-produced music. Using restrictive frameworks, she develops specific logics of movement and layered dance materials. High intensity, representations of violence, as well as the specific relation of the performer to her (female) body, are currently important to her.
As a performer, she is engaged in 'The Honey House' by Nathan Ooms, 'Tragédie, new edit' by Olivier Dubois, '#BACKTONATURE' by Antoine Dupuy Larbre, 'PARADE' by Stanley Ollivier and 'PREY' by Kris Verdonck. In 2022, she joined leprojetgeo for a double artistic research project based in Bellevue, a retirement home in Brussels. Besides working as performer or maker, Mooni recently started to work as a movement/choreographic coach for Antoine Dupuy Larbre and Marthe Koning.
From 2023-2025, she is associated artist at workspacebrussels. With this support, she has started to work on a new performance, called 'Zeros & Ones'.
For a new creation called Zeros & Ones (working title), Mooni is researching representations of power and powerful bodies, starting from superheroes and feminist science fiction. For this specific residency, she wanted to work with light and smoke, as these likely will become the main scenography together. Working by herself and with Antoine Dupuy Larbre, she experimented with different kinds of smoke machines, to see how they can help to make clear cuts with light and make the light very tangible on one hand, and on the other hand how the smoke can blur movements or the perceived intention behind them. Together with the technicians from A Two Dogs Company, they also worked on ways of expanding the virtuosity of the body through the use/creation of specific tools.
Zeros & Ones (working title) is a dance piece for a group of four performers. Starting from superheroes and science fiction novels, Mooni explores representations of powerful, potent bodies. With superheroes there is the contradiction between an enormous power on the one hand, the idea to be able to change the world (and the tolerated violence that goes along with it), and on the other hand, a world that never really changes. The superhero never moves forward, obtains no lasting change, does not age and never dies. He is stuck in his condition.
Science fiction writer Octavia Butler describes her interest in inventing powerful, otherworldly characters, as a way out of powerlessness. But even in her novels, that power or potency becomes a source of endless violence, where no one manages to escape the temptation of power and oppression. Yet there is something about these bodies that feels seductive, even emancipatory.
From these ideas, the material of this work was born: a one-hour stop-motion set to music at 200 bpm. The movements made during the stops are inspired by the various actions of superheroes (attack, protect, defend, wipe sweat or blood, recharge yourself) and by an imagination of the body as bigger, more capable, more powerful than it is, as cyborg, as immortal. The concrete actions are a path to a more existential form of struggle.
The overarching structure of 'beats' in which the performers are stuck raises questions about how change is possible, and how strength or power is related to that possibility. Throughout the creation, we explore where hope might lie, and how to find it within or through this pre-existing structure. For these questions, Mooni explores the work of feminist thinkers around violence and self-defence, such as Elsa Dorlin and Veronica Gago.
Hanako Hayakawa is a Japanese dancer and dance maker based in Berlin, Brussels and Tokyo. She graduated from P.A.R.T.S. training cycle which is a 3 years contemporary dance education program in Brussels. Prior to that, she studied in Tama art University where she majored in Performing Arts mentored by Saburo Teshigawara.
She works with international artists mostly from Europe and Asia such as Tino Sehgal, Miet Warlop, Leiko Ikemura, Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe, Emmilou Rößling, Michiel Vandevelde, Nikima Jagudajev, Simon Van Schuylenbergh, Norbert Pape. Hanako takes on different roles as a choreographer, dancer, and performer.
Her choreographic work is an extension of her dance practice and is built on a combination of her experiences as a dancer, performer, and mediator.
In 2021 she made the dance piece "Dragging" together with Osamu Shikichi, supported by the Centre National de la Danse Pantin and Tokyo Arts and Space and premiered at TOKAS Hongo. In 2022 she got selected for open call “made in Berlin” which is a one month research residency program in Lake studio Berlin. She got a stipend by #takeHeart for her research “Killing scores” 2023 where she extended her research within the residency program of Toyoka Theatre Festival(2023), Dance Base Yokohama and A TWO DOGS COMPANY in Brussels.
"Lurker" will be a dance solo that is inspired by the experience of Noh theater. Specifically, stretching the sense of time, spacing out, and rest as a way to contemplate. You could compare it with modes of togetherness in a sauna or a post-quest scene in an online game. You don't interact with each other necessarily but engage presence while your body is comfortably blurred. A lurker is someone who is present in a chatroom but doesn’t engage with the act, playfully hiding in the shadows and allowing for ambiguity to happen. Art as a form of camouflage. A form of relating to our surroundings in such a way that we almost disappear in the act.
"For this residency I would like to imagine and develop objects/bodies on stages that blurs the boundaries: ghostly bodies: the state of being unsettled but present/confident at the same time, empowerment by turning the situation around and striving to be comfortably unsettled. As a starting point I would like to research how objects can have their own life and move autonomously on the stage. I will develop the motion of floating objects and drifting objects. To find a body to be post subjective, a solo as an ensemble." - Hanako Hayakawa
Stefan Jakiela (1987) graduated as a performer from the Maastricht Drama Academy. After graduating, he worked as a performer, maker and scenographer. Together with Suze Milius, he founded the non-profit organisation House Crying Yellow Tears, within which they house part of their artistic work.
"For some time now, I have been fascinated by curtains on a stage. Curtains that open and close in different ways and in different shapes and arrangements. Every time they move, it seems like a new world emerges or the perception of things changes. It feels a bit like black holes to me, as if it were a universe that keeps expanding and growing endlessly.
I focus on these curtains to build a world, wondering both artistically and technically how they can move in space and what they tell us. I actually spend a long time initially sewing the curtains and then start thinking about how I can start hanging them, setting them, standing them, knotting them in the space and start exploring with what is possible. To come up with some kind of installation or scenography. In a next step, I would really like to ask some other makers, dancers or performers to see this space as a starting point for a possible new performance/performance.
At the same time, I am also working on 10 small mini performances or actions that I call '10 Actions To Brighten Up Life'. These are 10 small performances that I have in mind since a long time but never brought to life. How these projects will turn out and in what form they will appear is part of my research process within this residency."
Elevations is a sound installation inspired by dub-techno, a musical style at the crossroads of minimal techno and Jamaican dub from which it borrows the massive use of delay effects. According to the researcher Alessio Kolioulis, the effect of "artificial suspension" produced by dub-techno would be the sign of a "hybrid futuristic nostalgia ". Indeed, with its opaque textures, its harmonic simplicity and its microvariations in the motifs, this musical style seems to express at best the melancholy of the end of the party, the moment when the bodies relax, when the day comes to replace the night.
This project wishes to stage this particular space-time by making a formal and poetic translation: here, the musical material is no longer produced by synthetic sounds but by the pipes of an organ, the Organous. This instrument, built by the organbuilder Léo Maurel, is equipped with a specific device which allows to control the entirety of its pipes via a computer. Using computer programs that I design myself, it can produce complex sound masses, glissandi or recreate filters or delay effects. The automation of the instrument brings a great rhythmic rigor, which meets the demand of regularitý imposed by the electronic forms. Using computer programs that I design myself, it can produce complex sound masses, glissandi or recreate filters or delay effects. The automation of the instrument brings a great rhythmic rigor, which meets the demand of regularitý imposed by the electronic forms.
The natural spatialization of the sound enhances the immersion of the audience. Indeed, the Organous is deployed through different modules that can be positioned as desired. In the center of the installation, the spectators are bathing in an ocean of sounds coming from the four corners of the space, but they can also move and get closer to the pipes of the instrument. New qualities appear then appear: where at a distance, the music spreads like a sound halo that permits listening to the whole, this new proximitý makes it possible to seize the integralitý of the sound palette of the instrument, renewing the way of apprehending organ music, which is traditionally listened to at a distance.
The scenography, which will be realized by the Belgian visual artist and director Kris Verdonck, will also intensify the spectator's experience. Renowned for his immersive work, he will seek to poetically translate the atmosphere of the chill-outs - these areas of the techno party intended for the dancers to rest - through spectacular means. The light in particular, will allow to suggest the rhythmic elements absent from the musical score, thus producing a sensory metaphor of the aesthetics of techno.
By giving the computer the control over an age-old instrument and by immersing the public in a hybrid sound environment where acoustics and electronics merge, Elevations proposes a transversal musical experience where all classifications are blurred.
Mustaf Ahmeti (b. 1995, they/them) is a performance artist born in Pristina, Kosovo. In 2021, they graduated as drama artist in the master's program at KASK, Ghent. In addition to acting, Mustaf's practice also includes physical and abstract visual work and performance art. By focusing on the body as a field of research, they make an attempt through rituals to explore the relationship between the human and what is experienced as alienating, between humans and nature, nature and culture, fear and control. In their work, they want to get away from reductive ideologies, values, norms and truths in order to (re)discover ourselves - and thus also our own alienation.
(Un)conventional dialogue (working title) will be the beginning of a longer artistic trajectory centered on the mythological satyr. In Greek mythology, the satyr was a nature spirit with a human body, but also with hooves, a tail and legs like those of a horse. Satyrs were closely related to Dionysos, the god of wine, lust and excess. They were playful creatures who played pranks on people and challenged gods, and were especially known for their fierce sexuality.
Mustaf wants to take the space to work with the satyr to explore in an unfiltered way topics that are often hard to address, such as religion in relation to queer studies and body politics, in an artistic form. With the figure of the satyr, they seek a new perspective on taboos surrounding Islam and homosexuality; one that provides space to address and discuss these issues.
Mustaf will bring a twisted perspective to the historical satyr to generate a different perspective on the contemporary state of the times. In (Un)conventional dialogue, the hybrid figure of the satyr is brought into the now as a contemporary cyborg between body and technology, nature and culture, private and public, fear and control. It will be a transdisciplinary work at the intersection of visual art and performance art. Ahmeti will embody the satyr themself.
As a hybrid between human and technology, the cyborg has been around since Donna Haraway's Cyborg manifesto as a queer being that disrupts boundaries, norms and other dualisms. In feminist visions on the cyborg, its materiality and embodied qualities are central, two things that also matter to Mustaf's satyr.
At the same time, the cyborg in this performance is also an attempt to capture the specific in-between period in which humanity currently finds itself. The processes of transformation, whether it is the climate catastrophe, economic crises or political upheavals, causes the human being to always be unfinished and to find itself between a previous and future phase.
Premiere on the 7th of October during Radiant Nights #9 at deSingel, Antwerp
Performance artist: Mustaf Ahmeti
Sound: Gizem Karaosmanoğlu aka KOO
Dramaturgy: Kristof van Baarle
Coproduction: deSingel, A Two Dogs Company
With the support of: the Flemish Community
Special thanks to: marionette artist Paul Contryn