Alica Minar & Dorota Michalak: LUSH BLAST: Tasting the Untamed

 is a Slovak choreographer, dancer and curator based in Berlin and Prague; a graduate of BA Choreography (HAMU Prague) and MA Choreography (HZT Berlin); a programmer at Studio ALTA and curator of DANCETOPIA. Her works combine strong visuality, blending abstraction and narration with an intuitive search for humor and poetry arising from bizarre situations. On the basis of principles of dance and clowning, she researches how nudity and costumes distort the reality of the dancing body and its relationship with objects.

 is a choreographer/dancer and researcher based in Berlin since 2016; graduate of Tanz, Kontext, Choreographie (HZT/Berlin), Central European Studies and Intercultural Communication (UAM/Poznań). Her choreographic work is largely based on collective processes, mixing dance, voice practice and fieldwork. Fascinated with plants, she focuses on the sensorium, biological processes and sensualities to augment habitual fantasies and cultural frameworks. It takes forms of staged and site-adaptive performances, as well as social and educational projects. Her ongoing research “Dance in Planthroposcene” has been supported by Tanzpraxis 2022/2024 of the Berlin Senate. Inspired by SenseLab - Laboratory for Thought in Motion, she practices “meshwork choreography” bringing attention to relational aspects of artistic work across institutional and bottom-up contexts. Following folk rural heritage, she works with dance as cathartic, rebellious and relation-building practice, focusing on its auditial and energetic aspects. As a dancer, she collaborates with i.a. Alice Chauchat, Isabelle Schad, Zufit Simon, Pauline Payen, Renae Shadler, Angela Schubot & Jared Gradinger. Scholarship holder of Artistic Research Abroad by Goethe Institut 2022, #takeheart Residenzförderung in collab. with Hellerau 2022, danceWEB 2020/21, PROMOS by DAAD 2019, and Młoda Polska 2018 by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.