Contemporary Physical Performance Making (CPPM)

Song of the Goat Theatre (Teatr Pieśń Kozła) has developed an international reputation as one of Europe’s most innovative theatre companies, committed to researching what makes theatre distinctive to other art forms. Song of the Goat Theatre’s ever-evolving training, rehearsal and performance process is treated as laboratories, enabling the Company to research the craft of the actor and director and to evolve new techniques, performance languages and work. Commitment to connection informs the development of each new training approach, which always seeks to integrate movement, voice, song and text, creating performance that has an inherent musicality and connects with the audience on a sensory level.

Ultima Vez is a dance company that was established in the mid-eighties by Wim Vandekeybus, a choreographer, dancer, filmmaker, and photographer. The company showcases Vandekeybus’s unique style of movement, which explores themes such as the conflict between body and mind, feeling and intellect, and group and individual. His performances are dynamic and full of conflict, exemplifying a language of movement that contrasts intuition, impulse, and instinct with energy, risk, and danger.

Marco Donnarumma is a media/sound/performance artist, inventor, and theorist. He is a co-founder of the performance group Fronte Vacuo, and a composer, producer, and musician with Dadub and Leiche.

Donnarumma creates technological bodies to explore the boundaries of experience, aiming to provoke resonant aesthetic encounters that question how societal powers regulate the human body. Becoming late deafened has only intensified this approach. His transdisciplinary practice blends contemporary performance, new media art, and interactive computer music into solo performances, productions, installations, and films that defy categorisation. Rooted in performance art and movement research, he brings these disciplines into contact with sound, light, robotics, and AI to form a sensual, uncompromising aesthetic. To achieve this, he invents and handcrafts body technologies—such as AI-driven robotic prostheses and biophysical musical instruments—that explore visceral forms of interaction and generate music from the sounds of the human body. Close collaboration with scientific laboratories is often central to his artistic process.

A distinguished director and choreographer, Sasha Pepelyaev's artistic journey began in secondary school drama classes and deepened during his studies at Moscow University, where he discovered pantomime. His early career saw him perform as a mime soloist at the Taganka Theatre and the Moscow Concert Agency, laying a strong foundation for his later achievements.

Jan Fabre has grown to become one of the most versatile artists on the international stage. He makes a clean break with the conventions of contemporary theatre by introducing the concept of ‘real-time performance’ – sometimes called ‘living installations’ – and explores radical choreographic possibilities as a means of resurrecting classical dance. Fabre has been writing his own plays since 1975, although it was not until 1989 that they were first performed. His texts form an exceptional collection of miniatures, as it were, with a very open writing style and reflect Fabre’s concept of theatre as an all-encompassing form of art in which dialogue functions alongside other elements such as dance, music, opera, performance and improvisation. Chaos and discipline, repetition and madness, metamorphosis and the anonymous are all indispensable ingredients in Fabre’s theatre. The acuteness and reserve with which he employs language demand innovative solutions which have also appeared in the hand of other directors to have worked with his texts.

Hawaii-born Stacy Makishi frolics with many forms, including live art, film, visual art and physical theatre. She has performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Royal Albert Hall, TATE Modern and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Stacy Makishi has over 30 years of experience as a facilitator and has carefully cultivated crafty ways to catch artists off-guard. She has taught at Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts and has been a resident artist and guest lecturer at Queen Mary University, London. Stacy is produced by Artsadmin.

Henry McGrath is an interdisciplinary artist whose work merges theatre, film, and movement. He trained at RADA on the MA Theatre Lab and quickly gained prominence as a principal actor with the internationally renowned Song of the Goat Theatre, touring worldwide from 2014 to 2018 and taking on the role of Hamlet in their celebrated production, Crazy God. Alongside his extensive performance background, McGrath has also worked on mainstream television and film projects, contributing to innovative collaborations with acclaimed performance groups across the globe.