STUDIO SOMEWHERE RESIDENCIES

Throughout the year, TMS hosts residencies in Studio Somewhere, our incubator for performance-makers’ project development, rehearsal and collaboration. The Studio is host to our funded residency scheme, launched in 2022, alongside in-kind residencies and studio hire. Throughout 2023, Studio Somewhere provided a base for artists preparing for Take Me Somewhere Festival.

Stay connected about Studio Somewhere opportunities by joining out mailing list here.

You can find a selection of our 2022-2024 Studio Somewhere Residency artists below:

Rehearsal for a durational dance and sound performance called John. We are doing a first scratch performance at Dance Base Spring scratch night on March 17th. The work is a dance and sound piece inspired by the composer John Cage.

Photo by Amy Sinead.

Studio Somewhere Hires 2024

I started my research for “Listen to the Forest” in May 2022 when I was welcomed at Dance Base (Edinburgh) for a residency. During this time I mainly worked by myself, exploring the core of the piece and the combination between dance and spoken word. Since the beginning, breathing has played a crucial role within the piece and I understood I would need to deepen my research and my practice on this topic, which I did later in the year. Between late 2022 and beginning 2023 I turned “Listen to the Forest” from a solo into a collaborative work. After securing financial support for this first stage of development from Creative Scotland, I gathered around me a small team of collaborators: Eloise Kretschmer (music and sound), Benedetta Zanetti (British Sign Language) and Pirita Tuisku (outside eye and choreographic support). I was the dancer and voice of the piece, Eloise was providing music and sound and Benedetta was responsible for BSL integration: we are all representing the Forest’s perspective, enhancing one another with different artforms.

Over spring, we had the opportunity to rehearse at the James Arnott Theatre (Glasgow) for two weeks. At the end of our rehearsals we hosted a first public sharing of our work, followed by a Q&A, and filmed our first draft of the piece. During November 2023 we had a one-week residency at Tramway to rehearse and explore new elements which will support our second stage of development happening at the beginning of 2024. Evie and Sonya were introduced to the work and, as a team, we got further in our research and process. Now we are getting ready for our second stage of development, which will take the show to the next level (public preview). Our second R&D will last five weeks from w/c 29th January until w/c 26th February 2024. We will be hosted by CityMoves Dance Agency (Aberdeen), Studio Somewhere (Glasgow), Tramway Studio (Glasgow) and Assembly Roxy (Edinburgh).

Find out more here.

TMS Supports 2024

Shrek666 will round off their 4 Nations Fund by undertaking a residency in Studio Somewhere, developing a new solo show around themes of community, consent, politics, transexuals and what song to sing when the world’s on fire.

Shrek 666 is an ongoing project and international ogre embodiment by Scottish artist Dæmon Clelland. Dæmon is a multidisciplinary artist and maker working within Live Art, special FX prosthetics,moving image, sound, radio, visual art and tattooing. Interested in the intersection of technology, the body, and climate. Their work interrogates patriarchal systems of representation & oppression though non-human/post-human embodiment, trans-masculine perspective and transformation.

Photo credit: Manuel Vason - Tentacular Spectacular at Fierce Festival 2022

Funded Residency 2024

Climate Grief Karaoke is a performance that invites the audience to express Ecological Grief through song. At Studio Somewhere, Katy was working with artists Craig Manson and Aby Watson to explore the potential of audience participation and the communal/social bonding nature of karaoke. This project was funded by Arts Council England.

Studio Somewhere Hires 2023

I am a visual artist working across experimental performance, video and sound installation, collage, and writing. My live installations combine my body and digital media in unusual ways, creating a mysterious, sensual or comical atmosphere. I explore themes around the body and mind, life and death, blending the personal with the cosmological.

The work I am exploring during the Take Me Somewhere Residency is both sensorial and conceptual. I’m looking at mental states, specifically the relationship between abjection and joy. I am interested in the embodied mind; the relationship between flesh and concepts. Both lived experience and research contribute to my explorations of mind and body. I want to explore how joy and the enjoyment of the senses can be an act of resistance against the violence of our times. An important part of the residency will be a collaborative conversation between myself and the unusual musician, sound designer and composer for theatre and performance, Neil Simpson.
Image by Alan Dimmick

2022 Funded Autumn Residencies Scheme.

Jian Yi's practice is rooted in an ongoing enquiry into the ambiguities of emotional experience. They are interested in expanding the territory of performance practice by bridging the gap between our mind and our animal selves, the connection between the inside and the outside; exploring intensified mental and emotional states.

'Cloud States' is a multi-disciplinary performance art and dance piece mapping queer migrant belonging. Working with movement, art installation and video, 'Cloud States' builds towards a multi-form performance work exploring what it means to inhabit a space. Enabling the audience to access different experiences of time, memory and space, 'Cloud States' is concerned with redefining the politics of the body. In its drive to break down the borders of identification, 'Cloud States' works towards a perceptual shift in our understanding – changing our 'upright' perspective of the world and ourselves in a new kind of experiential body-politic – coming from the inside-out.
Image: Jassy Earl

2022 Funded Autumn Residencies Scheme.

Lauren La Rose (she/they) is a disabled/chronically ill, LatinX multidisciplinary artist, researcher and educator working at the intersection of curation, producing, radical pedagogy and social practice. Motivated by the personal and political, their research investigates counternarrative and participatory practices, expanding definitions of what it means to be mixed-race, disabled, and queer. 

Hold What You Love is the beginning of a participatory, embodied sound and video installation, experimenting with how to radically archive the stories we never tell. Situated within a long historical conversation between technology and protest. The durational performance interrogates how technological advancements have been used to promote and suppress social movements, and how disabled and BIPOC histories fit within these narratives. 

2022 Funded Autumn Residencies Scheme.

Molly Scott Danter is a dancer and maker from the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Molly has been an artist in residence at Atlas Arts and SEALL Performing Arts and at The Barn Arts, as part of their ‘Phosphorescence’ festival curated by Lucy Cash and Luke Pell. As a dancer, Molly has worked with various companies and independent choreographers such as Scottish Dance Theatre, Scottish Opera, Barrowland Ballet and Rob Heaslip. Molly is also a member Collective Endeavours, a music and dance performance improvisation ensemble.

“During the Take Me Somewhere residency, I will be continuing a research around my interest in the ecological contribution and structural make-up of mosses. I began this project whilst in residence at The Barn Arts where I performed a short experimental work using a mat woven of moss by Isle of Skye-based artist, Caroline Dear. Since this residency, I have been creating ‘Moss Scores’, with support from The Workroom. Working with the these scores as my base, I will continue the exploration as I ask what might there be to gain on different social, cultural and political levels by abstracting the natural structures and processes of moss (with particular focus on how they behave and relate to other species) and experiencing them with the body as I bring my focus to performance. An important inspiration thus far has been Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s book, ‘Gathering Moss’, which continues to influence on the work.”

Funded residency in partnership with ATLAS Arts.

I am a dance artist based in Glasgow. My movement practice emerged from the convergence of my research in Human Geography, specifically embodied social geographies, and my lifelong enjoyment and interest in dance. My current interests include reptile embodiment, back-up dancing, postmodern movement scores and erotic performance.

During my residency at Studio Somewhere, I was developing choreography and text for a dance-drama about Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards in collaboration with Josie Perry. Whiptail Lizards are an all-female species that reproduce without fertilization, but still stimulate each other in order to encourage ovulation. This has earned the species the reputation of ‘lesbian lizards,’ with many articles describing their sex as “pseudo copulation”. Humoured by these cis-heteronormative descriptions of queer sex, this performance work will draw parallels between the narration of Whiptail Lizards’ sex and depictions of lesbian sex in mainstream pornography. Embodying references from pop culture, cinema and porn, we will imagine the Whiptail Lizard population as an all-lesbian fantasy world, in which the male gaze and the fetishization of lesbians can be purposively enacted and reconfigured as a kink dynamic within queer sex. 

2022 Funded Autumn Residencies.

The TMS Graduates Residency is a partnership with the Contemporary Performance Practise course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. It provides graduating artists a weeks funded rehearsal space + mentoring sessions with the Take Me Somewhere producing team.

Kaiya Bartholomew (she/her) is a collage and performance artist based in Glasgow. Searching for tenderness and connection she peruses literature, theatrical traditions, modern art practices, poetry, dance and popular culture in all of its many-headed and fast-paced glory, to appropriate, borrow, collage and reimagine into works that speak openly of a human experience in an uncertain reality. She used the residency to develop movement and explore physical research around washing and laundry. https://kaiyabartholomew.squarespace.com/

Seán Talbot is an emerging artist and recent graduate of the CPP programme at the RCS. Working in theatre and contemporary performance, he's passionate about food justice, ecologically minded art and he creates work with a focus on intimacy and connection. In this residency he'll be starting development on an interactive food-based performance using recipes and found text to explore storytelling and connection to each other and our environment.

Image: Kaiya Bartholomew (credit Julia Bauer)

2022 Funded Graduate residency programme, in partnership with RCS

Sweætshops® (alternatively stylised as swextshops) is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist and multi-instrumentalist blurring the lines between live-art, sound, public disruption, AI, film and audience participation. Their moniker a portmanteau of sweatshops and sweetshops represents the contradictory stranglehold (exploitation and gratification) of the global economic lottery. Under the guise of an impersonal corporate entity their works are presented as esoteric products, creating intense absurdist allegories about the nameless social undercurrents of the 21st century from the waste of consumerism and pop culture.

About the residency:
witchtrialversion3 was the third iteration of a series of location specific sound-performances, commissioned for Hidden Door Festival 2022. The ongoing witchtrialversion project looks at our unwitting interaction with algorithms and artificial intelligence as a present-to-future manifestation of the duplicitous Sídhe and Færyland (Otherworld) of Scottish folk-belief. Viewing the witch burnings as unconscious mass human sacrifice events to usher in the spirits of the printing press and industrialisation. For the performance we processed the 374 names of those accused of witchcraft in the Edinburgh county over the 3-day run at the festival. With each of the accused assigned a labelled yarrow stalk (or "devil's plaything" used as oracles in British folk magic and I-Ching) in a ritualistic process of factory divination. Subsequently creating 3 brooms out of the aforementioned "wands" to be incinerated as sacrificial waste disposal at a later date. The improvised sound for the performance was created from the electromagnetic frequencies of a running conveyor belt, live and automated bagpipe drones and manipulated traditional music recordings.

https://swextshops.io

TMS Supports 2022

FRAN.K is a multidisciplinary performance artist working with choreography, persona and visual art in club spaces. Through the mediums of durational art, digital art and cabaret, their work interrogates identity, time, intimacy and dance as a form of healing. Their interests also lie in the intersection of fashion, technology and dance, creating highly striking live art dance & immersive installations. They believe in clubs as a space of sanctuary and protection for queer communities.

https://www.instagram.com/fran.k____/

Part of TMS Supports 2022

Hamshya Rajkumar (she/them) is an inter-disciplinary artist who navigates through embodied movement, intention and ritual. By situating the body outside the constraints of binary structures, she explores our human place in a world where ‘nature’ is separate, dominated and objectified.

About the residency:

‘I will be exploring Dark Ecologies who remediate disturbed Land, potentially in reference to the post industrial Land:scape Ravenscraig.

Embracing intimacies, bodies of reckoning, enlivening the pulse of Soil, Fungi, Moss and Lichen, will be a focus.

During this residency I will be inviting collaborators to work in the studio, and begin or end their day during Sun:rise/set at Ravenscraig. As site translators, we will be investigating how to highlight Dark Ecologies for human audiences in various manifestations of live art. Histories, origins and the multiple consequences contamination has spawned will also be examined.’ 

Check out Ravenscraig at @traudaze

2022 Funded Spring Residencies.

Leonor Estrada Francke is a Peruvian artist living in Scotland. She likes making work that plays with the boundaries of the real, exploring autofiction by combining documentary and surrealism. Thinking of the artist as witness, much of her pieces are deeply personal and political, but also queerly humorous. Her work is visceral, physical and popular. 

About the residency:

‘ROOM (provisional title) is a psycho-magical documentary about a father, a country and their broken backs. Two events interweave in the landscape of my infancy: the internal armed conflict between 1980 and 2000 in Peru which left an open wound in the country; and the ocean wave that left my father disabled for life. The profile of the mountain ranges of the Andes where the world has been turned upside down, is the same as the profile of a spinal column, each bone like a peak, a tooth. I am responsible for these wounds and they are woven into me. 

This new project furthers an enquiry into the encounters between autofiction, ritual and documentary. This residency will give me an opportunity to experiment using resources that enhance the contradictions between fiction and the real, creating a sense of alienation that encompasses both the social and personal world. ‘

Twitter: @lolaestrada Instagram: @leonor.estrada.francke Facebook: @leonor.estrada.f 

2022 Funded Spring Residencies.

Scottish-Indian dancer and performer Nikhita Devi (they/them) aims to re-integrate Indian Classical Dance with its origins in sacred temple dance and sensual spirituality, by infusing the movement vocabulary with the spirit and self-expression of burlesque, creating a personal style that both pays respect to and transcends its traditional roots.

About the residency:

‘My particular interest is to integrate the Indian classical dance form of Odissi with its ritualistic roots as sacred temple dance, while also taking inspiration from the intersection of yoga and burlesque that celebrates and liberates the feminine body and female sexuality. This is an ancient Indian philosophy called Tantra, which has deep connections with ancient Celtic pagan ritual traditions and deities that were present in Scotland but severed many years ago with the coming of Christianity. My work ties together many themes and forms but I aim towards bringing gnostic and ritual dance performance in Scotland by taking inspiration from her ancient past and beliefs and fusing them with my own cultural background, as well as knowledge of various different movement forms, to bring something experimental and immersive to the stage.’

www.instagram.com/NikhitaDevii

Photography credit: Amy Irene Marquez www.instagram.com/amyirenemarquez

2022 Funded Spring Residencies.

Zinzi Buchanan (they/them) is a non-binary artist working with dance, performance, poetry and facilitation. Zinzi spent a decade in Berlin performing in theatres, cabarets and clubs. Chronic pain turned their attention to facilitation as a way to make space for living beyond survival. Strong themes in Zinzi’s work: death, love, sickness and divination.

About the residency:

‘THE PITS is a project that takes a conscious and sub-conscious journey to the pits - the mines and the depressions - that I believe found their way to my life through my mining ancestors. My arrival at this topic was with an undiagnosable sickness. I was forced to look at my own life and global history to see how we arrived here. I feel we inherited the pits in our bodies. I will start the residency by walking the old mining land in Lanarkshire and writing a psycho(soma)geographic text. In the studio, I will invite queer companionship to face the pits with love and resilience. Although much is still unknown, I would like there to be collective singing and dancing.’

www.zinzibuchanan.com
www.sickbedseries.com
@shuffling_in_the_dark

2022 Funded Spring Residencies.

Amble Skuse (She/Her/They/Them) is a composer and sound artist who uses disability theory, body sensor technology, spoken word interviews and electronics to create unique sound works. She is interested in the interface between the disabled body and the exterior world, and has explored this through numerous sound walks using her wheelchair. Her most recent large work ‘We Ask These Questions of Everybody’ is a digital opera exploring the lives of Disabled people in the UK and premiered at ‘soundfestival’ ( Scotland:2021.)

Olga Uzikaeva (She/Her) is a contemporary dancer, performer, actress  and choreographer based in Belgrade, Serbia. In her current artistic practice Olga explores the  interaction between sound and movement using principles of instant composition and improvisation tools.

About the residency:

‘Amble and Olya examine political, national and personal independence and interdependence within a framework of inclusivity. We will be exploring the dependence of disability, the current desire for independence and apparent rejection of interdependence as a state of being for disabled in society.  We will work together, with Amble’s ‘soundpatches’, unique auditory 3D worlds, which Olya, wearing Mimu Gloves, will manipulate and explore through improvisation. This approach is a new experiment for inclusive collaboration where artists can collaborate yet work at a different pace.’

https://www.ambleskuse.net/belgrade-residency/

2022 Funded Spring Residencies.

Craig Manson (he/they) is a performer and choreographer whose work spans across theatre, dance, film, cabaret and club performance. Their work uses humour and movement to explore contemporary Queer themes, and has been presented around the UK at venues & festivals including Dance International Glasgow, The Southbank Centre, CCA, The Yard and Camden People’s Theatre.

About the residency:

Craig will use their residency to develop a new creative project about queerness and place. Building on initial research undertaken at Lyth Arts Centre in November 2021, this project aims to be a collaboration between Craig’s current residence of Glasgow and his home county of Caithness that utilises dance, moving image and sound design to explore dichotomies between queer utopia/dystopia, rural/urban, Scottish/Norse mythology, and the experiences of local LGBTQIA+ people who live in both places.

2022 Funded Spring Residencies.

Gordon Douglas is performance artist who works closely with arts and educational organisations. He devises embedded positions, unannounced events, and plays games with organisational staff and their stakeholders. His practice is founded on a commitment to (and scepticism of) collaboration, and sees him take on roles that: celebrate birthdays amidst austerity (Black Box Take Stock, Travelling Gallery, 2018), sign custody for eight-person tents (Absolutely Present, 2016-ongoing), hold it together then break down in offices (An Opposites Programme, CCA Glasgow, 2018-19), and elect non-humans to positions on Boards (That’s Governance!, SSW, 2021).

www.gordondouglas.org  
TMS Supports 2022