Art making
REWILDING THE BODY
INSTINCT Dance Festival, USA (2024)
Haihara Arts Center Residency, Finland (2022)
Rewilding The Body is a multidisciplinary performance & practice departing from the premise that “your body is the only piece of wild earth that will never leave you” (Brunto Latour, Down To Earth).
In other words, it approaches the body as an microcosm of larger social & natural (eco)systems and explores how unlearning mastery in this most intimate and imprinted of sites could prime us for better relationships with our living world.
The project is inspired by the environmental rewilding movement, which is a beautiful global initiative to restore landscapes by renouncing control and nurturing emergence. But rewilding must also start inside us, viscerally, in our bodies. It is a letting go, but also a coming home.
During a month-long residency at Haihara Arts Center in Tampere, Finland, I started research toward both a solo for the stage and a shareable social practice. Thereafter, I created the first edition of the performance — a trio for movement, sound, and projections — during two residencies at Stichting Triplets (Amsterdam) and Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center (Burlington, VT), with a premiere at INSTINCT Dance Festival in January 2024.
THE PLANT IS PRESENT
Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam (2022)
WHOLE Festival (2025)
The Plant Is Present is an immersive audiovisual installation that uses creative technology to facilitate an experience of conviviality, intimacy, and reciprocity between humans and plants.
It is an interactive performance in which plants and human audience members are equal protagonists.
I directed and produced the piece with Otherwise Collective for the Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam’s 3-week Hortus By Night event.
THE GARDEN OF
EARTHLY DELIGHTS
Toneelgarage Rotterdam (2021)
The Garden of Earthly Delights is a piece by TerazNow Dance Theatre about the beautiful, terrifying chaos of being human.
COLLECTIVE LOOM
Trailer from work-in-progress performance at INSTINCT Festival, January 2024.
Excerpts from residency research at Haihara, September 2022.
Het Hem, Amsterdam (2021)
In Collective Loom by Iris Woutera, the division between human and object, animate and inanimate, and cause and effect becomes blurred in a sea of wire, mesh and bodies.
A WAVE IS JUST A CIRCLE
DISPERSED BY TIME
THE LOFT, Kiel (2021)
What’s lost in a line? In this ever-emerging piece merging dance, sound, film, and landscape, we perform a collision of the linear structures of mastery with the cyclic reality of critical matter & mattering.
In the first iteration at the Dwarsdriewer Residency Program in Kiel, Germany, we explored the omnipresent circularity within movement and life.
We listened to the different timescales of circles — in our bodies, in space, in other bodies of matter. We discovered that indeed, a wave is just a circle dispersed by time.
VINCULA
A COUPLING POTENTIAL
Insight Festival, Berlin (2020)
All communication is movement, an exchange of signals transmitted over space and time, a wave. Waves of communication emanate from
our brains, mouths, bodies, or devices,
connecting us in a synchrony of understanding.
Vincula: a coupling potential is an immerisive, interactive performance exploring the power of
Theta frequencies to create an experience of entrainment between audience and
performers (both human & audiovisual).
WHAT DOESN’T END IN WATER
ENDS IN LIGHT
Hongerige Wolf Festival, NL (July & Sept 2025)
Pirkanmaa Dance Centre, FI (March & Sept 2025)
WHAT DOESN’T END IN WATER ENDS IN LIGHT is a nomadic trio for two human bodies and a body of water (e.g. Finland’s Lake Näsijarvi, Holland’s Dollard Estuary, The Danube River Basin, the Atlantic Ocean…). It merges creative technology, immersive performance, queer ecology, and eco- social ethnography to make the rationally-known inextricable link between humans and water viscerally felt.
We research feeding live sensor readings from data buoy stations into a hanging, reeling IoT stage, to which two dancers must constantly adapt and which provides the physical impulses for our movement – effectively taking the water body as our dance partner. Equally, through interviews with scientific and community subject-matter experts, we gather the place-based stories held by the water body – the liminal power and personhood of myth, the geological histories of deep time, the anthropocenic attachments and anxieties – which form the foundation of our performativity and immersive audiovisuals.
In this way, we spawn a hybrid human-water “performer” (queer ecology’s answer to technodystopia’s cyborg future) and partnering language that collapses notions of self/other, human/nature, intimate/vast, autonomy/ interdependence.
Made possible with support from Creative Industries Fund NL, Culture Moves Europe, Pirkanmaa Dance Centre, and Wageningen University x Nationaal Programma Groningen
Trailer from premiere at Pirkanmaa Dance Centre in Tampere, FI (Sept 2025).
Moments at Hongerige Wolf Festival, July 2025.
BUST:
SOME ATTEMPTS AT REWILDING THE CHEST
What stories does a chest carry? Some are visible on the skin or clothes — traces of struggle, transition, affirmation. Others are hidden beneath the ribcage — embodied memories of love, fear, grief, rage.
BUST excavates the femme chest as a contested body zone shaped by history, intimacy, and power. Drawing on punk’s disruptive energy, two performers move through shifting landscapes, using breath, lungs, and heart to navigate layered stories.
A multidisciplinary work, BUST blends dance and wearable installation in collaboration with the punk duo Personbag and the visual artist Natalia Manta. The work brings together practices around the body as archive, rewilding the body, ceramic and metal work.
In co-production with Tanzhaus Basel, CH
TOUR DATES
22-24 April 2026 || Tanzhaus Basel (CH première, co-production)
8-9 May 2026 || PLEIN Theater, Amsterdam (NL première)
17-18 June 2026 || Dokzaal, Amsterdam
24 September 2026 || COKO Space
Concept, Choreography & Performance: Maria Pisiou & Anna Riley-Shepard
Composition & Sound Design: Personbag (Lana Harris & FiFi)
Wearable Sculpture & Set: Natalia Manta @natalia_manta
Dramaturgy: Rodia Vomvolou
Thinking Together: Fer Gonzalez Morales
Photos & Video: Jace Kunfermann & Camille Janssen
Video editing: Maria Pisiou
Special thanks to Corinne Eckenstein, Sebastian Züber, Kihako Narisawa, Movement Laboratory, and Laura Boser
Made possible with the support of Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, Het Cultuurfonds, Tanzhaus Basel, Sky Studio Amsterdam, and DANSLAB Noord.
Due to Dutch culture sector funding cuts,
we are currently running a crowdfunding campaign to pay our team fairly for upcoming shows
of BUST in Amsterdam!
Please consider contributing by visiting our campaign page below. It truly makes a difference <3
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