And Now - An Evening about the Future of Theatre

RICHARD GREGORY - QUARANTINE

Richard Gregory is co-Artistic Director of Quarantine, based in Manchester, UK. Richard has developed a distinctive and influential practice around a response to the commonplace. His work with Quarantine has involved collaboration with a vast range of people including philosophers, families, politicians, architects, plumbers, soldiers, scientists, chefs, sociologists, children, doctors, dancers, florists, opera singers and many others.

Richard has directed 25 projects for Quarantine across the past 24 years. His most recent work, 12 Last Songs (2021), is a 12-hour piece - part-performance, part-exhibition of people - that invites workers to demonstrate and talk about their labour and their place in the world. It premiered with Transform festival at Leeds Playhouse (UK) in October 2021.
Richard co-curated Ark (2020/21) for Quarantine, commissioned by HELLERAU & Ringlokschuppen (DE); Onassis-STEGI (GR); Teatro Municipal do Porto (PT); Maillon (FR); SPRING festival (NL) & PAI Warsaw (PL), collaborating with artists, activists and experts to examine the notion and presence of borders in each city.

He directed the award-winning What Is the City but the People? for Manchester International Festival (UK, 2017); BAK & SPRING Utrecht (NL, 2018), Ruhrfestspiele (DE, 2019) & Münchner Kammerspiele (DE, 2021). Together with other members of Quarantine’s ensemble, Richard was an artist-in-residence at MITsp festival, São Paulo (BR) in 2020.

REUT SHEMESH

Reut Shemesh is a choreographer and media artist from Israel who receives top funding from the state of NRW.
Her pieces and films have been shown at Art Cologne, Tanzplattform, Impulse Theater Festival at tanzhaus nrw, HELLERAU in Dresden and Kampnagel in Hamburg, among others. In March of this year, her commissioned work "Bad Mothers" premiered for Theater Oberhausen and on 16 + 17 September HELLERAU in Dresden will present the fourth part of the GOLA series: "GOLA 4th Movement". This year also marks the beginning of a longer collaboration with the production house fABULEUS in Belgium on the subject of masculinity and ultra-fan groups.

TANJA KRONE

is a director, curator, performer and musician. In her work, she declares art to be a space of possibility, searches for forms of communalisation and exploits the supposed poetry of the documentary as the textual basis of her artistic explorations. According to the motto: everyone has something to say... She is the inventor and co-founder of youthful salvation armies, world's biggest women's rock bands and cities of women*, prefers to talk to REAL people and set marketplaces in motion for 30 hours. Lately she's been touring the country as "The Mayor", thinking about a model for a "Farewell House" and persistently searching for forms of good argument. Her future audience is still vague at the moment.

HENDRIK QUAST

Hendrik Quast is a queer performance and action artist. He is dedicated to performing and craft techniques such as ventriloquism and taxidermy. Through their translation into theatre, the boundaries of nature and art, illness and health, and high and entertainment culture are addressed.

SIMON HARTMANN

Simon Hartmann received his training as a stage dancer at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. There he met Daniel Ernesto Müller, with whom he founded the artist collective HARTMANNMUELLER after graduating in 2011. Between 2013 and 2018, both were also members of the dance company of Ben. J. Riepe. In 2015, they received the City of Düsseldorf's Förderpreis in the field of performing arts. In 2021/23 they will receive the top funding of the state of NRW. On stage and in their expressive photo campaigns, HARTMANNMUELLER present themselves as artistic figures who skilfully play with stereotypes and pop-cultural aesthetics and send a wink behind the viewers' eyes. HARTMANNMUELLER's artistic profile spans humour and seriousness, dance and performance, different gender roles, clichés and reveries. At the centre is the human being in his or her behavioural patterns as an eccentric being who constantly tries to create meaning and yet finds himself in nonsense. In doing so, they entertain, challenge and strain their audience in the best sense of the word. Stylistically, they take their cue from the film and pop culture of the 80s and 90s. Their pieces are spaces full of poetics in which every prop, every costume, every sound snippet can be the carrier of another storyline that we often think we know - only to have HARTMANNMUELLER breathe a life of its own into it and question our ideas. With the tanzhaus nrw Düsseldorf and the Ringlokschuppen an der Ruhr Mülheim as co-production partners, as well as PACT Zollverein Essen and Fabrik Heeder Krefeld as supporters, in the sense of residency and reflection space, they are broadly positioned in NRW.

MARCEL NASCIMENTO

Marcel Nascimento is a performer, video artist and studies scenic research at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. His research and artistic work deal with queer studies, sexuality, body images, identity and the self as well as pop culture. Media means and the relationship of the spectator to the performer are essential for him. He is part of the performance collective notsopretty.

TEMYE TESFU

ተመስገን ተስፉ (Temye Tesfu) writes poetry for stage and paper. Performs in German-speaking countries and beyond; sometimes in front of four, sometimes in front of 4000 people. Curates and moderates event series in Potsdam, Berlin and Leipzig; leads workshops for creative writing and text performance; initiated the post-German reading stage parallelgesellschaft in 2017. Lives and works.

DAVID KONO

David Guy Kono was born in Douala (Cameroon). After completing his training as an actor, dancer and puppeteer in 2005, Kono was awarded the prize for best actor at the "Theatralement votre" festival in 2009. Since 2013, he has been working with kainkollektiv from Bochum on pieces such as "Fin de Mission", which traces European colonialism. In 2015, Kono developed the performance "No Title" as part of the programme "The Incantations of the Disuiting Muse" at Savvy Contemporary in Berlin, which deals with different perspectives on the body and the invisibility of the soul. He has been living and working in the Ruhr region since 2017. In 2017, Kono conceived the performance "Lah Kam" as part of the Musrara Mix festival in Jerusalem, which addresses the tension between an inside and an outside world. As part of the Theaterfestival Favoriten in Dortmund, Kono developed the performance "Tcha. Sol. Boden" in which he explores the historical parallelism of wealth and exploitation. In 2018, David Guy Kono was awarded the grant of the county Nordrhein-Westfalen for young artists and was on stage several times in 2020 with the WHY NOt collective with "Why Not Reality". His piece "Metamorphose" also premiered at the 2020 Favoriten Festival in Dortmund and was subsequently shown at Ringlokschuppen Ruhr.

GESINE HOHMANN

Gesine Hohmann studied cultural studies and aesthetic practice in Hildesheim. She is part of the performance group vorschlag:hammer, which also includes Kristofer Gudmundsson and Stephan Stock. vorschlag:hammer have been developing theatre productions as a collective since 2009. In recent years, their performative narrative theatre has opened up to a wide variety of aesthetic strategies, to visual-atmospheric or body-oriented works. They freely adapt existing material or develop research-based productions on ever new topics. From 2015-2025, vorschlag:hammer will receive top-level funding from the state of NRW. vorschlag:hammer's works have been awarded jury prizes at the Körber Studio Junge Regie, the 100° Festival or the Best OFF - Festival Freier Theater; in 2017, "Die Erfindung der Gertraud Stock" received an invitation to the Impulse Theatre Festival. vorschlag:hammer continuously cooperates with Ringlokschuppen Ruhr as a production base, other regular partner venues are Ballhaus Ost Berlin and ROXY Basel. Cooperations with the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus and the Schlosstheater Moers have also been established through the Doppelpass fund.

SIMON KUBISCH

Kubisch's work focuses on a psychoanalytical-Marxist critique of the cis-white, patriarchal, post-fascist political economy of those cover narratives inscribed in racism, misogyny, classism and anti-Semitism.
Kubisch lives in Berlin with his child, partner, pony and dog.

SILVIA EHNIS PÉREZ DUARTE

Silvia Ehnis Pérez Duarte was born in Mexico City in 1985. She currently lives and works between Cologne and Bochum. She received a classical dance education in her hometown, and through her work with dance companies in Mexico City, she discovered contemporary dance. She moved to Cologne to complete a degree at the Centre for Contemporary Dance. Her interest in choreography and in the creative process led her to the Master's programme in "Scenic Research" at the Ruhr University in Bochum. She works with the idea of "shared bodies", the narration and representation of this web of raw materiality, fleeting experiences and unpredictable stories that are inevitably connected to other people. Dance expands the space created in this web of multiple realities within and beyond our bodies. She is a founding member and co-artistic director of TachoTinta and curator of the Tanzatelier 0.10 residency programme at Quartier am Hafen. Her work has been presented in Mexico, Germany and South Korea, including stage pieces, artistic research projects and workshops. She collaborates as a guest dancer with Cocoon Dance, Kollektiv Zoo and Overhead Projekt, among others.

BEATRIX SIMKÓ

Beatrix Simkó graduated from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest and the Hamburg University, where she studied performance and media art. She has been an active creator and performer for more than ten years of the Hungarian dance scene, and in the last years she has worked in many international theatre and dance collaborations. She is an Aerowaves and Life Long Burning selected artist, who also works in a close partnership with the Budapest-based Workshop Foundation. She is constantly in a vivid dialogue on intercultural perspectives about social structures. In her works she engages the environment surrounding us through the expressive tools of the physical body. In 2012 she earned the Leonardo grant and in 2015 the grant from Theatertreffen International Forum in Berlin. She has been on residencies in Tanzquartier (Vienna), Espace Catastrophe (Brussels), Uferstudios (Berlin) and MDT (Stockholm). She created choreography for Central Europe Dance Theatre and Csokonai Theatre Debrecen. As a performer and co-creator she worked in international projects on the border of dance and theatre such as Schauspielhaus Graz, Rodeo Festival Munich and with PengPalast! Company at Schalchthaus Theatre Bern. Since 2016 she has been performing her duet with Zoltán Grecsó, called #Orpheus#Eurydice which was awarded with the Grand Prize of the Hungarian Festival of Dance in 2018. The dance theatre performance Long time no see! co-created with Jenna Jalonen was selected in the Festival d’Avignon in 2018 and to Aerowaves Festival in 2019 in France. She has presented her works at several international venues such as Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, Španski borci Ljubljana, Hessischen Staatsballett in Darmstadt, Kampnagel, Kuopio Dance Festival.

CHRISTIANE KÜHL

After studying modern German literature (with a focus on theatre/media), philosophy and Spanish at the University of Hamburg, Christiane Kühl was an editor for taz, die tageszeitung, kulturSPIEGEL and radioeins/rbb. Since 2005 she has worked as a freelance editor and author for various media and as a theatre maker. In cooperation with the video artist Chris Kondek, she has created almost 20 performance projects and installations that have toured nationally and internationally (doublelucky productions); most recently "Auflösung" in cooperation with the residency of Schauspiel Leipzig. From 2011-2013 she was a consultant and deputy to the artistic director of the Berliner Festspiele. Since 2014 she has curated interdisciplinary symposia (art and theory), among others for the festival for new art steirischer herbst (AT) and the Goethe-Institut. Since 2018, she has been the editorial project manager of www.weiterschreiben.jetzt, a portal for literature from war and crisis zones, awarded The Power of The Arts Prize 2018; since August 2019 in cooperation with the German Literature Fund.

KATHRIN EBMEIER

Kathrin Ebmeier (born 1986 in Hattingen) lives in Bochum and Cologne, is an artist in various formats and prefers not to use pronouns. Or marks them in italics. Kathrin Ebmeier develops performances with the Anna Kpok collective, which, between online games and stage spaces, turn the audience into co-players. She is the initiator of the Oval Office Bar / Schauspielhaus Bochum, a "cosmopolitan queer bar" and curates an independent queer programme together with Heike Kandalowski. With the "Screwing Bitches" Kathrin Ebmeier develops feminist youtube tutorials and with C. Bovermann, C. Baron and E. Krefta she develops AudioWalks and radio plays. In 2020, Kathrin Ebmeier conceived and realised her first art exhibition GEISTER on workers' struggles in the Ruhr region at the Akademie der Künste der Welt/Cologne. Kathrin Ebmeier completed her Master degree in Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen and has since shown her artistic work at the Ruhrtriennale, the Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main, the Ringlokschuppen Ruhr, the Theater Dortmund and the Schaubude Berlin.

LEETJE VAN DE CRUYS

Leentje Van de Cruys is a Belgian theatre-maker, performer and teacher. She trained in Stage Arts
at the LemmensInstituut (LUCA School of Arts), Leuven, where her graduation piece was selected
for Theater Aan Zee Festival. In 2006 she moved to the UK where she worked extensively for over
15 years as a theatre-maker, performer and director with UK and Belgian companies including
Quarantine, Reckless Sleepers, Prototype Theatre and Plane Performance, as well as making a
series of solo shows (Horse, Best Party Ever, Knitting to Worry About, Belgian Waffling) exploring
domesticity, motherhood and homesickness. Leentje has taught and supervised on Contemporary
Performance courses at a number of higher education institutions including Lancaster,
Manchester Metropolitan and Salford Universities.
Since 2022 Leentje has been based based in Mechelen (Belgium) where she continues to make
and perform, including as a regular collaborator with Quarantine, and is touring internationally with
their current show, 12 Last Songs.