Artists
About the artist
Anne Sophie Kapsner [she/they] is a theatre director, writer and researcher based in Munich, Germany. Her interdisciplinary work is located in the border area of documentation, drama and pop aesthetics. The starting point is usually biographical events.
Anne studied Theatre Studies and Swedish in Munich and Stockholm [2010-2014] as well as directing at Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts [2014-2020]. Afterwards Anne worked as a director’s assistent at Münchner Kammerspiele, where she also performed on stage [Heldenplatz; Dir: Falk Richter, 2021] and directed herself [ALLES GOLD, nichts glänzt; text based on Platonov by Tschechow]. Since 2022 Anne works as a freelance artist nationally and internationally, most recently from May till September 2024 with Falk Richter at Dramaten Stockholm.
Her works were shown among others at studio NAXOS Frankfurt, PATHOS Theatre Munich, Dschungel Wien and Staatstheater Mainz. She worked several years with the Frankfurt based group imaginary company on shows for all-age audience, mostly in cooperation with the Mousonturm Frankfurt. Anne is also interested in teaching: In 2023 she supervised a monologue work by drama student Lola Giwerzew at the Mozarteum Salzburg. Anne also works with young people, most recently in May 2024 with a group of schoolgirls on a political speaking performance on the german constitution [Walk of Democracy; public space Munich].
Anne’s art deals with identity and gender [LUST; 2020&2022], social structures and big feelings [Nur die Liebe zählt, haben sie gesagt; 2020-2023] - always with a queer feminist perspective. Humor and absurdity are particularly important in stage aesthetics.
Anne is currently preparing an audio walk about the jewish, activist, queer actress Therese Giehse for Münchner Kammerspiele with premiere in March 2025 and a novel adaption of „Outlawed“ by Anna North with premiere at Theaterhaus Jena in May 2025.
About the artist’s work
In their research Anne Sophie Kapsner [she/they] is dealing with death, grief and mourning. She traveled to Warsaw [Poland], Madrid [Spain] and Piatra Neamt [Romania] as well as to the Romanian countryside to find out about personal stories of loss, mental health care, orthodox burial rituals, different ways of dealing with mourners in the different societies, suicide prevention, the reactions of those around them to mourners and about the integration of death into life. The big question on Anne’s mind is: How can we go on living after the death of a loved one?
Anne’s research is more about finding than seeking a specific answer, it’s more about listening than talking. It’s mostly about sharing a space and time and small personal details. Anne originally began researching queer bodies in repressive systems in Warsaw. Caused by the sudden death of her younger brother in November 2023 - in the middle of the Future Laboratory - Anne felt the need to change their topic. Due to various [negative] experiences she has had, Anne wants to process her own grieving process artistically on the one hand and find ways to deal with death and grief differently in society on the other. So Anne began to speak openly about it, to share her story, and people responded and „happily“ [and somehow relieved] shared their stories.
Can theatre open up a space for this topic and how? Anne is now working on a concept for a theatre performance that tries to make the experience of grief and mourning tangible for people who are not grieving. But it should also comfort mourners and make them feel less alone. As a starting point, Anne tried out an idea in Madrid with the dancer Laura Ramirez Ashbaugh: Laura performed a farewell letter with her body. In Romania, Anne met with a bocitoare, „a woman who cries at someone’s funeral“. In Anne’s case, she sang traditional songs and performed one for Anne’s brother.
In Piatra Neamț Anne also organised a workshop called „It’s ok to not be ok“, where she opened a space of mourning [together] and sharing memories of people we have lost in our lives through physical and writing exercises from Anne’s practise.
Hailing from Porto, Portugal, Carlota is a theatre maker, director and facilitator based in Bristol. She works with young people, communities and artists, focusing on inclusive practice, access and social change. With a background in physical theatre, her practice explores themes of migration, language, identity and mental health. Carlota is interested in making live performance with people who are not necessarily trained actors and her work is often political, challenging conventions and broadening perspectives. She is dedicated to breaking down barriers and increasing representation in theatre, especially for migrants and disabled people. Carlota frequently works in socially-engaged projects with Bristol Old Vic, Travelling Light, Many Minds and Local Learning. She is passionate about engaging diverse communities in culture and the Arts. Carlota was recently commissioned by Projekt Europa to develop an idea for co-created work with local communities, in collaboration with Royal & Derngate. She has also been awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England. Carlota is currently looking for opportunities to explore new international collaborations.
Celine was born in the suburbs of Paris. During her childhood, she trained as a ballet and modern jazz dancer at the Conservatoire de Creteil. After studying law in France and the UK, she moved to Luxembourg in 2012 where she started her office career as a jurist in academia. In pursuit of her true passion, she got involved in the local improv scene and started working with Valérie Bodson at the Conservatoire d’Esch-sur-Alzette. After a brief – and ultimately beneficial – existential crisis, she quit her legal career in 2018 and turned completely towards theater. Celine followed a one-year training in Forum Theater & Theater of the Oppressed techniques. She was in charge of the actor training for the collective creation Tous Migrants bringing on stage refugees and Luxemburgish residents. Since then, she has played in theater, improv and movie productions mainly in Luxembourg.
Elena Rabkina is Belarusian artist focused on photography and interactive art. Elena researches and documents the immaterial story of people, things and places, pays attention to the small real-life details and explores the current meaning of the mass culture. Her artworks have social commentary and reflect on agism, social inclusion, urbanism, ecology, mental health, migration, activism. Left Belarus in 2020 due to the political repressions, lived and worked in Odessa, Ukraine till the beginning of the war. Exhibited at National Center for Contemporary Arts (Belarus), SÜDBAHNHOF fotografische Werke (Germany), Mark Rothko Art Center (Latvia), Lviv Municipal Art Center (Ukraine), Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture (Ukraine) and other places. Apart from being an artist, Elena is a social activist, co-organizer of urban and art festival Vulica Brasil and mentor for social and art projects.
Dramaturg, director, author based in Poland. A graduate of Theater Studies (specialisation: performative studies) at the Jagiellonian University and Theater Directing (specialisation: dramaturgy) at AST National Academy of Theater Arts in Kraków. The winner of the Creative Scholarship of the City of Kraków. In her directing works she focusses on intimate, small narrations, especially in documentary forms, drawing on techniques “verbatim” and “devised theatre”. She believes that small narrations can be a lens of larger processes. Topics that she has undertaken in her works are: minority identity, faith of modern people, coming of age, Polish Sign Language, Silesia working class. As a dramaturg she collaborated with directors in state theaters as well as independent initiatives creating the texts and dramaturgy for plenty of shows among others: Work, work (2020), Dialog monthly, co-written with Piotr Froń; The Lost Years (2021) Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival; Tales of the Blocks of Flats (2022) dir. M. Streker, Wrocław Puppet Theater, Pustostan (2021) by K. Zdunek, National Stary Theater. She is a fan of languages, especially focused on how languages influence people’s perception.
I studied Literature (degree mark 110/110 cum laude), Performing Arts and Multimedia Production (d. m. 110/110 cum laude) and Direction at Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi (d. m. 110/110 cum laude). I worked for “Diaghilev”, a theatre production center and an artistic residence in Puglia as a director, assistant director, actress, production manager from 2014 to 2018. In 2019 I worked as assistant director in Teatro alla Scala for Gilbert Deflo’s “Rigoletto”. In 2022 I worked as a director for the Olivetti exhibition at the ADI museum in Milan and in the same year I directed and wrote, with the playwright Matilde Marras, a children’s musical opera, inspired by the life of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, that was staged at the Verdi Auditorium in Milan. At the moment I’m working as an assistant director for Piccolo Teatro in Milan and as a director for Salani Editore, in a project inspired by Jean Giono’s “The Man Who Planted Trees”, which reflects on the concepts of community, happiness and pacifism. I am in the process of founding my own company with a playwright, Eliana Rotella, and an organizer, Chiara Donadoni, with which I share a political, artistic and ethical views. With this company I’m directing two contemporary plays: one is “CORPORA” which deals with the theme of the difficulty of mourning in a society that has lost its rituals, the other one is about Hedy Lamarr, who made the invention of the century but wasn’t taken seriously because she was a woman, an artist and a foreigner. I’m the creator and project manager, with the team of Theatron 2.0, of “Omissis – Osservatorio Drammaturgico”, a free digital platform aimed at enhancing contemporary dramaturgy in Italy and networking between directors and playwrights (the platform has just been launched: https://webzine.theatronduepuntozero.it/omissis-osservatorio-drammaturgico/).
Lucile Saada Choquet (she/adopted – FR) is a decolonial artist based in Brussels. After studying performing arts in Normandy, she trained as an actress at Arts²/Ecole Supérieure des Arts (Belgium). Coming from an artistic formation anchored in a racist and eurocentric cultural heritage, she develops and questions her own artistic language. Defining herself
as an artivist, Lucile Saada experiments in each of her gestures a decolonial practice of art (programming, play, dramaturgy). Preoccupied by the trace, she creates scenic devices – performance, installation – which put into play political bodies and rethink collective imaginary. With her first creation, JUSQUE DANS NOS LITS, she situates her work in the place of a collective repair of the colonial trauma. She makes radical artistic choices that embrace issues of representation in terms of gender, race and class. As an adoptee, in 2022 she will conduct an artistic inquiry into transracial and transnational adoption.
Urban innovator, interdisciplinary artist and architect of peace. In 2018 she initiated Back on Track! - Gardens of Listening project listening labs along the heritage trainline Linha do Vale do Vouga in Portugal, were created. She was selected artist within Open Access – Experimenting with performing arts and transmedia. In 2018 she completed international summer school in sustainable/social architecture at Critical Concrete. She was Visiting Research Fellow at University of Brighton – Center for Digital Media Cultures, conducting research on serious games for urban planning and VR/AR innovation. She is Rotary Peace Fellow 2018, CEC Artslink International Fellow 2022 and (r)Evolutionary of Design Science Studio, run by habRitual and BFI. Among her recent projects is PLAY:CES urban game which was featured at Fusion - Urban Games Festival Matera and Sprites of Meadowlands, featured at different festivals around the world, most recently at Regenaissance Salon: Art Inspiring Regenerative Future at Art Basel Miami 2021 and RABAN Urban games festival in Lodz. She co-authored Unseen Sacred Spaces, exhibited at Festival Ars Electronica 2020: In Kepler’s Gardens.
Maurin Ollès joined the Marseille Conservatory in 2009. He joined the Superior School of Dramatic Art of the Comédie de Saint-Étienne in 2012. In 2015 he played in Un beau ténébreux directed by Matthieu Cruciani, Letzlove Portrait Foucault directed by Pierre Maillet, Truckstop, directed by Arnaud Meunier and presented in Festival d’Avignon 2016. His show Jusqu’ici tout va bien on the issue of juvenile justice, is scheduled in Avignon in 2016. In 2018, he worked again with Arnaud Meunier in J’ai pris mon père sur mes épaules by Fabrice Melquiot and he participated in the regional “culture and health” system coordinated by La Comédie de Saint-Etienne. In this context, he created the show Pour l’amour de quoi? and runs in about thirty health establishments in Loire department. The 2019/2020 season, he takes over Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s Saigon tour. His latest creation, Vers le Spectre is currently on tour.
Graduated in direction and dramaturgy at Institut del Teatre of Barcelona and artistic director of Ça marche, a live arts company. Some of the company’s projects – focused on working with non-professional performers – are Cantus Gestualis (Festival Grec Barcelona ‘22), Los figurantes (2021, Festival TNT Terrassa, Teatre Lliure Barcelona, Nau Ivanow Barcelona, Conde Duque Madrid) and Los figurantes (video installation) [2021]. In collaboration with the dance company Antes Collado, he created The cave sleeps (with that rock on top) in 2018. He has also teamed up as a dramaturge with La Veronal dance company in Après moi, le déluge (Festival 10 sentidos ’16 Valencia) and Ariadna (Stattsoper Wieswaden); and with Antes Collado in several projects (Festival Grec Barcelona, Biennale Dansa Venezia, American Dance Festival). In the field of theatre, he worked as assistant director for Roger Bernat/FFF at Flam (Festival Grec ‘19, Teatre Lliure Barcelona).
Odete (1995, Porto) works in between writing, performance, music and visual arts. Her work intends to reveal the mechanics of historical writing, unveiling them as techniques of “truth”. She’s currently developing a methodology she calls “paranoid archaeology”, based on a psico-somatic, transgender research of historical documents. She studied theatre in ACE Porto and holds a BA in Philosophy from Universidade de Lisboa. She has presented her performance pieces throughout Portugal, alongside 3 music LPs and one book.
Born in 1995 in Bucharest, Ruxandra Simion is a Romanian cultural worker. Ruxandra studied anthropology at the University of Bucharest, as well as stage direction and dramatic writing at the University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest. She started working in the political theatre field in 2018 during the Summer School for Political Theatre at Macaz, where she was artist-in-residence, and directed her first play, Fuckulty. The play follows personal stories about the systemic harassment in arts universities, fat-shaming, and sexual abuse, a topic which had been until than tabu in Romania. Since 2018, she worked as a stage director, playwright, curator, workshop facilitator, and project manager. She studied and practiced the methods of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, she wrote opera librettos, designed a dramaturgical game about housing, worked with teenagers, wrote and published poetry and performative texts. In 2020-2021, she did her internship at Ison Theatre in Athens, the first Greek theatre and drama school for disabled artists. Ruxandra`s artistic work explores political and social issues, and it uses satire and musical theatre as favourite means. She is also interested in community theatre production, and the applied arts as tools of education and social reflection. Her work so far was focused on topics such as climate change, feminist empowerment, work and workers, reflection on her mental health, and the critique of capitalism.
In 2017, Märc completed her master’s degree at DAMU – Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, majoring in acting at the department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre. After graduation, she was employed in a children’s puppet theatre for two years and then became a freelance actress. Since then, she has collaborated with many Prague scenes and projects (National Theatre, Studio Hrdinů, Pomezí, Ufftenživot, X10…). Since 2021, Märc has been a curator at Cross Attic, focusing on the processes and practice of hybrid~performance~care. In the same year, she started working in the Prague asylum for homeless (trans)women, called Homelike. She focuses on producing and curating outdoor exhibitions, teaching yoga and taking care of her dog.
Simon Restino (b. 1991, France) lives in Strasbourg. He studied in London at Central Saint Martin’s College (2010-2013, 1st Degree Honor). From painting, his research unfolded in space and became installations, writing and performance. At Beaux-Arts de Paris-Cergy (2014-2016), he started a large project built around the enigmatic figure of Kaspar Hauser. He trained at École du TNS (Strasbourg) in the scenography section (2017-2020), which led him to conceive spaces, costumes and objects for Simon-Elie Galibert. He contributed to french school pavilion of the Prague Theatre Architecture and Design Quadrennial 2019, curated by artist Phillipe Quesne. As part of his personal project, he staged Kaspar Hauser 1828-1833 (TNS, 2019). He collaborated with Julien Gosselin (Dekalog, 2021) and designed scenography & costumes for director Blandine Savetier. He performed in Castellucci’s Bros (2021). He is currently working on personal projects including The Bros tapes, and (Kaspar Hauser).
She was born in St-Petersburg, Russia – 1988. She got a BA degree in Musical Theatre Directing, St-Petersburg. Directorial debut – Larson’s Rent in St-Petersburg, got censored (all LGBT topics were erased) – that made her immigrate. Boitcova got an MA degree in Theatre and Performance (but really, Live Art) at Queen Mary University of London - 2015. She then stayed in England for a few years – performed at numerous venues, including BAC, Camden People’s Theatre, Brighton Dome, etc. Mostly queer cabaret, drag, lipsync, live art, video performance. She worked at the Barbican Art Centre. Boitcova moved to Beijing, China where she worked as a Drama Teacher and directed shows with local students. She started Tales of Transformation project – an international communal trauma archive and got grants and awards for it. She moved back to Russia during the political activism phase and joined Eve’s Ribs (feminist) and Coming Out (queer) organisations. Curated festivals for both. She did a lot of protest- and community art (minorities, people with disabilities). She started writing plays and won awards for her first play Today My Cat Died. She then decided to focus on dramaturgy. She started her second double MA at Uniarts Helsinki and Goethe University Frankfurt and is currently writing her second play and working on a documentary queer show for MadHouse Helsinki.
