Ekin Bernay is a performance artist and dance and movement psychotherapist who explores the intersection of art and healing. In her live artworks, she merges the therapeutic insights of Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) with a broader audience through performative workshops. Her work delves into the healing qualities of performance art, often using text, sound, and choreographic situations to guide and engage participants. As a therapist, Bernay has extensive experience in adult mental health and working with children with autism. She holds a Master’s Degree in Dance Movement Psychotherapy from Roehampton University. Bernay, who divides her time between London and Istanbul, has presented performances at esteemed institutions including Tate Modern, the V&A Museum, Block Universe, the Royal Academy, Istanbul Biennial, and the Pera Museum.

Kélina Gotman is a scholar whose work navigates the intersections of disciplinarity, translation, and the ways knowledge is inscribed through writing. In her book, Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Studies in Dance Theory, Oxford University Press, 2018), which won the David Bradby Award for outstanding research in international theatre and performance studies, delves into the nineteenth-century emergence of the concept of the ‘dancing disease’ within colonial medical, psychiatric, and anthropological discourses. The book interrogates how the notion of choreomania took shape during a time when anxieties about disorderly public bodies, amid the rise of nation-states, permeated scientific and social thought. In this exploration, Gotman considers how choreomania became emblematic of formless revolt, encompassing public insurgencies, anti-colonial uprisings, village celebrations, and neuromotor disorders. Her work traces how these ideas of 'formlessness' recurred through cultural narratives—from the Dionysian bacchanals to St. Vitus’s dance—before being incorporated into epidemiological literature and Orientalist historiography. Through this lens, Gotman reexamines how modern science has conceptualized dance as a disorderly, often racialized form of movement, offering a critical rethinking of the ways we understand movement within our disciplinary histories. Her research has been further developed in numerous articles and chapters across leading journals and anthologies, including Performance Research, parallax, and The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain.

Bogomir Doringer (Serbia/The Netherlands) is a prolific artist-researcher and curator, currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. His work delves into the socio-politics of collective movement within night culture and clubbing, using these environments as a lens to examine broader social phenomena. Through his ongoing research project, “I Dance Alone,” Doringer observes club-goers from a bird's-eye view, interpreting their movements as reflections of social and political shifts. From this exploration, Doringer developed the concept of “Dance of Urgency,” which emerges during times of personal and collective crisis, transforming dance into a form of political resistance, coping, and survival—empowering communities to act. In addition to his artistic practice, Doringer is an international speaker, lecturer, teacher, and head of education and research at Nxt Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands). He also co-curated Frei(T)räum at Berlin’s Stadt Nach Acht conference, now known as Envisioning Free Spaces in Amsterdam, where his curatorial work bridges the gap between artistic research and policy-making to support and sustain night culture through collaborative dialogue. During the initial week of the residency programme, Bogomir Doringer will deliver a lecture exploring his ongoing research project, I Dance Alone, where he examines dance floors from a bird’s-eye view—a perspective once known as the divine perspective. He will discuss how he analyses crowds like microscopic samples, drawing connections between dancing bodies and broader socio-political shifts. His lecture will delve into how dancing crowds, much like clouds signalling changing weather, can serve as indicators of social urgency and transformation. Doringer will also introduce his concept of the "dance of urgency"—a form of movement that arises during personal and collective crises, harnessing dance's empowering potential for individuals and communities. Supported by archival footage and visual examples, this session will offer residents deep insights into the political dimensions of dance and the dynamic power it holds for those who dare to move.