TUE 24 MARCH, 7pm
APT Gallery
6 Creekside, Harold Wharf
Deptford
London, SE8 4SA
Pay What You Can
£5 / £10 / £15 / £20
(suggested price £15)
Join us for the opening of Fest en Fest 2026!
Fest en Fest 2026 presents expanded choreography as a field that moves beyond the dancing body into sound, text, publishing, objects, installation, labour, intimacy and collective action. Curated by H2DANCE, this year’s programme brings together UK and Nordic artists whose works treat choreography as something that can be read, listened to, touched, looped, built, dismantled and shared.
From 7pm
Deaf for 4’33”
Chisato Minamimura
Deaf for 4’33” is a performative installation piece which takes its title from John Cage’s three-movement composition 4’33”. Cage’s famous score instructs the musicians to not play their instruments for the duration of the piece, and instead invites the audience to listen to the sounds in their immediate environment. This intervention is a recreation of this score from Chisato’s Deaf perspective, offering alternative ways to hear, listen or feel the sounds.
8.30pm
Flirt
Marte Sterud and Ann-Christin Kognsness
In the performance Flirt, Sterud/Kongsness are surrounded by the audience as they take full ownership of the stage. They are active, flirtatious and contact seeking as they thrive on attention and response from the audience. It is about insisting on being the gaze and not only the spectacle.
The performance series Butch Tribute is an artistic and political work exploring what a butch is and can be, with and by the Norwegian dancers and choreographers Marte Sterud and Ann-Christin Kongsness. The term butch is used about masculine women in the queer community – a group that is often marginalized or made invisible. With this project, Sterud/Kongsness wants to diversify the representation of butches, by embodying different representations of queer, female masculinity.
Butch Tribute consists of the three dance pieces; Flirt, Roses, Flannel Dream (2021) and the text-based performance A Butch is a Butch is a Butch is a Butch (2023) and the short film Handy (2026).
Handy
Ann-Christin Kongsness & Marte Sterud
The short film Handy is inspired by the queer, iconic choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s minimalist short film Hand Movie from 1966. By zooming in on a hand, and thereby letting one part of the body dance an entire choreography, we continue Rainer’s strategy of challenging what choreography is and can be. We focus on individual desire and how this constitutes a big part of a person’s sexuality, through fantasies related to the idea of—but also characterized by the absence of—another’s body.
The works below will be exhibited at APT Gallery throughout the festival week.
Public Intimacies
by Salaméche
Public Intimacies (2023) is a grid of digital-print posters bearing large blocks of colourful text.
Each poster juxtaposes two different parts of ‘my’ or ‘your’ body. They can be read as a document of a past event, or as a score for something yet to happen. Inciting a mental cinema, or a choreography of the mind, most viewers find their imagination beset with various possible collisions between bodies; that might traverse the office, the dance floor, the bedroom and the street.
Public Intimacies speaks to the complexities and delight of what it means to share civic space, particularly in the uncertain aftermath of #MeToo and Covid-19. Ambiguously referencing both formal signage and our informal movements, the work invokes instabilities of embodiment, proximity, collision, possibility, and desire.
The work has previously been presented at ICA (2023, London) and Gasleak Mountain (2023, Nottingham).
WORKS BY Aliaskar Abarkas
Rooted in Abarkas’ ongoing exploration of sound, listening, and collective experience, these works emerge from moments of focused auditory attention. Often made while listening — to music, voices, ambient sound, or silence — the drawings function as embodied responses rather than illustrative records.
Layered, repeated, and assembled into modest constellations of paper, the works trace how perception moves through the body. In particular, the series reflects on neurodivergent modes of attention, where listening becomes a physical, rhythmic, and spatial process — shaping gesture, mark-making, and composition.
Together, the drawings form a quiet yet charged archive of movement, sensation, and time, asking how sound is held, translated, and reorganised through the body.
Chisato Minamimura
Access
APT Gallery is a step-free venue with wheelchair access and toilets.
Look at their Visual Guide to find out more about the space. If you have any access requirements, please email michaelkitchinproducer@gmail.com.
ARTISTS
Chisato Minamimura is a Deaf performance artist, choreographer and BSL art guide. Born in Japan, now based in London, Chisato has created, performed and taught internationally and is currently a Work Place artist at The Place. Chisato trained at Trinity Laban in London and holds a BA in Japanese Painting and MA from Yokohama National University. Chisato approaches choreography and performance making from her unique perspective as a Deaf artist, experimenting with and exploring the visualisation of sound and music. By using dance and technology, Chisato aims to share her experiences of sensory perception and human encounters.
Marte Sterud and Ann-Christin Kongsness (Sterud/Kongsness) connect through their personal and theoretical interest in the relationship between dance and the body, gender and performativity. In their performance Soft Manifesto (2015), they explored the androgynous and ambiguous body, with a playful and fluid relationship to gender expression, moving in and out of different bodily states. In 2018, they organized Queer Dance Art – a conversation series (www.skeivdansekunst.no) during Oslo Pride, with contributions from sixteen dance artists who actively take a stand on questions around gender expression and sexuality. In 2021 they premiered the ongoing performance series Butch Tribute – a celebration and exploration of queer, female masculinity.
Salamèche is an arts collective based in Nottingham and London, currently composed of Rohanne Udall and Paul Paschal.
Trained in visual arts, dance and philosophy, we first started making work together as clowns. These days, we use many different materials and processes: performance, video, printmaking, sculpture, radio broadcasts, publication, workshops and curation. Rather than pretend harmonious exchange between artist and audience, we instead revel in the unavoidable presence of expectation, uncertainty, betrayal, and surprise.
Sometimes we set up our own things and sometimes we work in institutions. We seek out and contribute to cultures of invitation, playfulness and thought. Our current interests include: hosting, in/sincerity, ugliness, and DIY publishing.
www.currentname.info
Aliaskar Abarkas (1994- Esfahan) is an Iranian artist based in London.
Rooted in alternative and communal art education, his practice stages choreographic encounters that move from individual elements into collective expression. Often in dialogue with historical sources, Abarkas builds collaborative frameworks that invite participants to interpret and activate inherited scores through music, exhibition, and performance making.
He is currently an associate artist at Sadler’s Wells / Rose Choreographic School (London, 2024–26) and the Lead Artist at Autograph Gallery (Acts of Solidarity, in partnership with All Changes, London, 2025–28). He holds a BA in Visual Cultures from the University of Tehran and an MA in the Theory of Contemporary Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London. Previous residencies include Cubitt Gallery and the Swiss Church (London). Abarkas has also been an associate artist with Rupert (Lithuania), the Institute of Postnatural Studies (Madrid), Castro (Rome), Open School East, and Syllabus V (UK), among others.
His interventions and collaborations have been supported by institutions including the Barbican Centre, ICA, The Mosaic Rooms, TACO!, Pushkin House, LUX, YDP Foundation (London), CAPC (Bordeaux), LOCALES (Rome) Scuola Piccola Zattere (Venice), and CIRCA. Upcoming projects include commissions and collaborations with Counterpoints, Whitechapel Gallery (London) ,Arts Catalyst (Sheffield), 421(Abu Dhabi) and the Singapore Art Museum.