Bita Bell is a dance artist and composer with a BA in music composition and an MFA in dance. Born in Iran, she studied in Hong Kong and lived in the U.S. from 2012 until moving from New York City to Vienna in 2020. Her artistic research and practice are based on the concepts of the body as archive, collective imaginations, visceral sensations, radical softness, and playful improvisations. Her works aim to expose, question, and subvert socio-political matters that disrupt the joy in daily life. 

She recently completed the artistic fellowship at THIRD DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam where she self-published her first zine titled containing multitudes, at times fragmented: a compilation of personal, political, and poetic writings emerging from a diasporic experience of living through urgent times. 

She has been awarded the 2023 Startstipendium for Music and Performing Arts from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture and the 2024 DanceWeb Scholarship for Vienna’s Impulstanz International Festival.

In the frame of our programme Capacity Grid, Bita Bell is visiting Puzzle#8 in Belgrade.

This workshop is conceived and led by André M. Zachery (Artistic Director, Renegade Performance Group) as a laboratory for exploration through time and space. Through given prompts and tasks participants will be guided through movement sequences that seek to find the synergies between the interplay of physicality and acoustic resonance. Embracing diverse genders, abilities, and artistic lineages, movement exercises will move through improvisation, call & response, cyphering, and play will be used to take us through this week of exchange and dialogue. The lab seeks to propel movement into uncharted territories, fostering a non-verbal exploration of intention, invitation, and initiation within shared space.

Take a look at our Open Call if you are based in Austria and interessted in this workshop.

André M. Zachery is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist of Haitian and African American descent and is a scholar, researcher, and technologist with a BFA from Ailey/Fordham University and an MFA in Performance & Interactive Media Arts from CUNY/Brooklyn College. As the artistic director of Renegade Performance Group his practice, research, and community engagement artistically focused on merging choreography, technology, and Black cultural practices through multimedia work. André is a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Gregory Millard Fellow in Choreography and a 2019 Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Choreography.

His works through RPG have been presented domestically and internationally, receiving support through several residencies, awards, and commissions. These have included the LMCC Arts Center on Governors Island, Dance/NYC Coronavirus Relief Fund, CUNY Dance Initiative, Performance Project Residency at University Settlement, ChoreoQuest Residency at Restoration Arts Brooklyn, 3LD Art & Technology Center, HarvestWorks and a Jerome-supported Movement Research AIR. Awarded grants have been from the Brooklyn Arts Council, Harlem Stage Fund for New Work, and a Slate Property SPACE Award. Commissions have come from the Brooklyn Museum, Five Myles/BRIC Biennial, and Danspace Project.

RPG has earned mentions and favorable reviews from publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Culturebot, Infinite Blogspot, Futuristically Ancient, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, the Daily News, and AFROPUNK. As a technologist, André has collaborated with various artists through RPG, the design team of 3LD Art & Technology Center, and The Clever Agency on design installations, immersive media productions, film productions, film editing, projection mapping, and performance collaborations.

André has worked on significant projects across artistic mediums as a choreographer, media designer, and consultant with artists such as Daniel Bernard Roumain, Cynthia Hopkins, Davalois Fearon, Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE, Arin Maya, Rags & Ribbons, The Clever Agency, Kendra Foster, Manhattan School of Music, Burwell & Sasser and Spike Lee.

André is an Assistant Arts Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts in the Dance Department at NYU. As a scholar, he has been a member of panels, led group talks, facilitated discussions, and presented research on a myriad of topics including Afrofuturism, African Diaspora practices, and philosophies, Black cultural aesthetics, technology in art and performance, and expanding the boundaries of art making within the community. He has been a panelist and presented his research at institutions such as Duke University, Brooklyn College, University of Virginia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is an advisory board member of the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado. André has taught at Brooklyn College and been a guest faculty member at the dance programs of Florida State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, The Ohio State University, the University of California Los Angeles, and the University of California Riverside.