JENNIFER FOR A DAY (GER) 2023-2024
(previously known as C A L L S)
We are Caroline, Amelie, Lisa, Laura, and Steph, a loose crew of performers, dancers, artists, strippers, musicians, stage and costume designers, media artists, and researchers. We don’t all embody all of these categories, but we all sail through several of them. As individuals we are seasoned practitioners with our own practices but together we form a formidable crew that is as interested in chartering the unknown as we are in keeping the ship clean, i.e. holding space for each other and following the spiral all the way down. The enmeshment and collaboration between us is complex and sticky, and this group is not so much of a fixed collective as a container for chaotic growth. We are interested in alternative narratives as antidotes to neoliberal hegemony, gender as a vehicle against the state, representations of femme anger, decolonising the gaze, and the poetics of the cosmos found in the synecdoche of the human body.
Parcitipating artists
Lisa Rüger (GER)
Lisa Rüger (Bergisch Gladbach, 1993) is performance artist, strip-performer, costume designer and set designer. She is a passionate advocate of the pro-sexwork movement with a focus on queer-femme bodies. In 2022, Lisa completed her degree in stage and costume design at HfBK Dresden, studying as well at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been featured in various off-spaces, festivals and clubs, as well as at the Fusion Festival, the Theaterakademie August Everding in Munich, the NSDokumentationszentrum in Munich, the Körber Studio Junge Regie 2021, the Staatstheater Saarbrücken, the Staatstheater Kassel, and Hellerau, Zentrum für Europäische Künste.
Steph Quinci (GER)
Steph Quinci is a Berlin-based dance and performance artist. Their aesthetic and research-based pursuits are defined by soft a legato demeanour, sculptural studies, release, and suppleness. Their dance background is a mix of classical ballet, American modern dance, and their studies as a junior collective member with the Compania Zappala in Sicily. Since five years they’ve danced with Paula Rosolen/Haptic Hide (Frankfurt AM), as well as working often with Go Plastic Company (Dresden), Caroline Beach (Berlin), Sandra Man (Berlin), Enad Marouf (Berlin) and as a guest performaner for Constanza Macras/Dorky Park (Berlin).
Laura Morales Dávila (GER)
Laura Morales Dávila(Seville,1986) is a choreographer and performer graduated of a professional Dance Conservatory in Seville,Spain. Best dancer award by the AISGE Foundation to attend as international choreographer to the American Dance Festival. In 2013, together with Greta García, created the multidisciplinary collective Hermanas Gestring, winning the first prize in the Certamen Coreográfico de Madrid. In 2017 she premiered her first solo, starting that year her own company, Laura Morales.She has collaborated with Horacio Macuacua ,Aitana Cordero, Judith Sánchez Ruiz in “Encaje for Ten” which premiered at Uferstudios 2019 and Trauma Bar & Kino in 2021, with Caroline Beach in “Sailor on Aisle 5” and SONDERANGEBOT. In 2020, she created “Me Laura Palmer” which was produced by the Lofft Theatre in Leipzig. And her last production “El último acto de Fe” premiered en 2021 at the Teatro Central de Sevilla.
Caroline Beach (GER)
Caroline Beach (Dallas, Texas, 1990) is a choreographer and performance artist based in Dresden and Berlin. She holds an MA in Choreography from the Palucca Hochschule and is finishing a Masters at the AdBK Nürnberg under prof. JP Raether. She has made works for a multitude of spaces across a range of mediums including theaters, galleries, offspaces, a lake, the Internet, and a media storage closet. She explores much of her work through the lens of Sailor, a slippery and permeable avatar that sails around the materiality of desire beyond the neoliberal chokehold. She plays in the band Cocktail Napkin with Casey Ouzounis.
Amelie Sabbagh (GER)
Amelie Sabbagh (Würzburg, 1991) is a performance artist, stage/costume designer, and activist working in the fields of theater, dance, and performance. After completing a degree in theater, film, and media studies in Vienna, she studied stage and costume design at the HfBK Dresden as well as Fine Arts at the University of Leeds in England. She explores themes of sexualization of femme bodies, female anger, and gender inequality and racism in both digital and analogue spaces. Her works have been shown at venues such as the Volkstheater Wien, objekt klein a Dresden, Hole of Fame, and the Festspielhaus Hellerau. She did costume design for “The Kidnapping of the Bride,” which won the Short Film Jury Award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
Taken residency at
HELLERAU – European Center for the Arts
HELLERAU acts as an interdisciplinary and international centre for dance, performance, music, theatre and media arts. It offers spaces for productions, festivals, concerts performances, exhibitions and discourse, cooperates with various regional cultural partners and is firmly connected internationally. An important part of HELLERAU is a residency program, which offers opportunities for artistic research, networks, production and encounters throughout the whole year.
Davvi – Centre for Performing Arts
Davvi – Centre for Performing Arts is a hub and a gathering point in Northern Norway for the professional independent Performing Arts community. The organization is a laboratory for new ideas, artistic research, and an open space where different cultures are cared for. We challenge hegemonic thinking and support cross-sectorial artistic working and thinking. We are staff of 11 curios people, we are placed in Hammerfest, Tromsø and Bodø and we are a space that offers residency, laboratories and producer services.
UP
The purpose of UP is to develop and upskill the independent performing arts throughout Denmark. We define the free and independent performing arts as individuals, collectives and companies who work professionally with performance and primarily for and with independent performance groups, project supported companies, and lesser established theatres. Often without permanent access to a stage or a venue.
Who are JENNIFER FOR A DAY?
The artists formerly known as CALLS are Caroline, Amelie, Lisa, Laura, and Steph, a loose crew of performers, dancers, artists, strip-performers, musicians, stage and costume designers, and researchers. We don’t all embody all of these categories, but we all move through several of them. We are interested in alternative narratives as antidotes to neoliberal hegemony, gender as a vehicle against the state, femme rage, and the poetics of the cosmos found in the synecdoche of the human body.
CALLS was a placeholder as we found ourselves as a collective, waiting for the calling of our true name. The first residencies were formative in forging our identity, aesthetic and methodics as an amorphous conglomerate body. As we have and continue to expand our limbs and find new legs, we’ve found it useful to move from shell to empty shell, hollowing our our new weird bodies in service of mechanised utopias and teenage daydreams. We are…
jennifer for a day
Photo Credit: Peter R Fiebig
What is your goal with the “Moving Identities” project?
be hot and end the world
jennifer for a day is spawning new modes of research as well as strategies for collectivised making and holding space to create and learn. We want to examine how we could make a sustainable working process that allows us to continue our research while still being able to meet our basic needs which include everything from being able to go to therapy, to paying rent. The luxury of the time and space provided isn’t something we’ve always had access to, so we want to take advantage of it in order to go deep into whatever offers itself to us. Our goal is to use the momentum and the joy that we’ve found through our research in order to fully realise this as a production. As the research continues, jennifer for a day is excited about different possibilities for producing and sharing work: we believe that we are making something that could feel as home on a stage as it could as a durational performance in a gallery, and also have performative off-shoots, video aspects, and web performances. But at its core, the work remains consistent as we commit to meeting each other, allowing things to develop from their own impulses, and making collective decisions.
Photo Credit: Peter R Fiebig
What methods do you use to achieve this goal?
First and foremost, jennifer for a day is finding itself as a collective, being attentive to the needs and desires of each member and trying to navigate how that translates into a group research. In order to do this, we use open improvisations, group readings, material and object research, and writing. We’ve kind of adopted a throw everything in the pot approach in order to see what might be good to cook. In addition, jennifer for a day is trying to be permeable to the outside: theory, workshops, engaging with other artists, film, and opening our process to others for feedback and discussion. We are also hoping to build connections with individuals and institutions who can support the continuous evolution of jennifer for a day as we plan to realise this and future works as full productions that can be shared with many publics.
Photo Credit: Peter R Fiebig
How does your current project relate to your previous works, and what motivates you in this process?
As jennifer for a day, we all bring our current threads of research from our independent projects and try to find ways in which they intersect and diverge. In the first residency, we started by looking at femininity as materialism, and we plan on continuing to use this as a point of departure. We’re motivated by our mutual respect for each other, a desire to use each member’s creativity and critique as a catalyst, and by many weird, wild and beautiful things that calls to us. Together we have fully realised two major projects: Sailor on Aisle, a stage work for Festspielhaus Hellerau, and Sonderangebot, an adaptation of that work for public and semi-public spaces. But our connections are much more interwoven than that. Caroline, Amelie and Lisa have been working and performing together since 2018, creating dance pieces, performance and media installations. Laura and Caroline met and worked together in 2017 at the American Dance Festival in North Carolina. Amelie and Lisa realised their own immersive performance installation ‘Welcome to Daisyland’ last September at Objekt Klein A Dresden and are roommates who often are commissioned together. Steph and Caroline have danced and worked together in their own work but also for other choreographers and were recently featured in a bad photograph as advertisement for a festival in West Germany without their knowledge or consent. In this process for the first time, we’ve placed ourselves on a flat hierarchy with equal creative agency. jennifer for a day is positively surprised by how well our ideas and inspirations overlap and challenge on another’s and in general how easy it has been to make work together.
–jennifer for a day
Photo Credit: Peter R Fiebig
