LAB Artists

Declan is a dancer and choreographer based in Basel. His choreographic interest lies with implicit expression, pop aesthetics and the border between fantasy and reality. He holds a Master of Arts from London Contemporary Dance School and has completed other artistic education courses at SKH/UniArts, Stockholm. Declan is also part of The Field, the associated collective at Tanzhaus Zürich where he has worked with Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Meg Stuart, Isabel Lewis and Simone Aughterlony. Declan regularly collaborates with the choreographer Frédéric Gies and has also performed with Martina-Sofie Wildberger and Martin Forsberg amongst others. His choreographic work has been shown at ROXY, Tanzhaus Zürich, Tanzplan Ost, PACT Zollverein (DE), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK), The Place (UK). In 2019 he received the danceWEB scholarship at ImPulsTanz and in 2023, was part of Springback Academy in the frame of Aerowaves. 

Jana lives in Basel and works for state theatres and independent venues. She studied interior design and scenography at HGK FHNW Basel with an exchange semester in the stage and costume design class at KHB Weissensee Berlin.
Afterwards she has worked as an assistent at Theater Basel and Schauspielhaus Zürich, among others. 

In her work, she is interested in the immediate and the unpredictable. She works with clear references and puts them speculatively into new visual realities.
Jana collaborates with others to search for a collective language in which to talk about the spaces that surround us and their narratives. She works with the groups hexen flexen, schwestern and rat. 

Miriam grew up in Frankfurt am Main and studied theatre studies and directing in Hildesheim and Giessen, but mostly in Paris. She has been living in Basel since 2013 and works as a freelance theatre maker, performer and dramaturge. In 2017, she went to Cairo for three months with a scholarship from Pro Helvetia, and has spent time there every year since then, working with artists from the region. Together with the Egyptian performer and activist Salma Said, she has developed several theatre pieces, as well as workshops on the topic of «Imaginative Justice».

In 2020, she began working for NGOs in the field of migration in Basel during the pandemic and has been studying migration law and legal gender studies part-time ever since. In her artistic work, she is increasingly concerned with the abysses of the migration regime and the potential that lies in a radical reshaping of legal fictions (most recently in the theatre piece «Court Fantasies», 2023 at Kaserne Basel). She is also a co-founder of the queer-feminist reading group «Blasphemic Reading Soirées» and reads tons of anti-colonial science fiction as a starting point for new visions.

She works hybrid in institutional contexts and as a freelancer. For several years, she has been trying to strike a balance between performing «for others» and self-initiated projects. She lives in Basel.

She is interested in combining themes of «being human» with movement, processing them in transdisciplinary contexts and making them tangible.
She would like to continue working on this approach in her LAB:
How do you as a creator create situations in which a public can gather to deal with topics somatically, playfully and intellectually and perhaps as a consequence gain an experience, an insight and/or a reflected attitude towards a topic.

She has been working on the topic of emotions for years - the emotional body. She would like to explore emotionality in relation to social contexts such as work and the public sphere. How can people use this valuable information, which the body constantly provides, to create, to enter into relationships and to work creatively with and for each other?

Artmann & Duvoisin, Ensemble Ballett Basel, Ben J Riepe, Christine Auberger, Dimitris Papaioannou, Fabrice Mazliah, Julie Shanahan, Katharina Weisheit, L Twills, Magdalena Weniger/ KOMA&Ko, Maria Schmid, Mario Eick, Mertixel Aumedes, Michaela Christensen, Mirjam Klebel, Nazareth Panadero, OFEN Co-Arts Platform, Oleg Stepanov, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Tim Etchells, PACT Zollverein, Pina Bausch Foundation, Regina Advento, Rodolpho Leoni, Rosi Kunz, Saar Magal, Stefan Brinkmann, Saburo Teshigawara and Rihoko Sato, Malou Airaudo, Senga Nengudi, and many more. *

*Selective listing of influential encounters in alphabetical order,
However, this does not do justice to the eclectic mass of influences and valuable encounters <3

His involvement with electronic music ranges from computer music, drum machines, and analogue synthesizers to modular synthesizers and DIY projects. He is also active in various music projects. At the beginning of the year, Michel and Mikolaj Rytowski toured Switzerland and abroad with the audiovisual performance «Kolloid». In addition to concerts in Switzerland, they also performed «Kolloid» at the Naxos Halle in Frankfurt and the «House of Music Hungary» in Budapest. 

Michel is currently working on an installation for the Rümlingen Festival and is collaborating with the composer Anna Sowa and the duo Mao Zhu and Li Kun on the «Bamboo Shoots» project as part of Pro Helvetia's co-creation programme. After earning his first bachelor's degree at the Institut Kunst Basel, he completed another bachelor's degree and a master's degree in audio design at the Musikakademie Basel. In 2022, he received the inaugural Eduard Brunner Composition Prize for the piece «Formen». In addition to his work as a musician, he works freelance on technical development and sound design for art projects and exhibitions.

Lua Leirner grew up multiculturally in France, Brazil and Germany with an artistic and musical Family. She lives and works in Basel as a graphic designer, photographer, performer, museum mediator and deaf sensibility expert for public services and institutes.
She graduated in 2008 with a diploma in design from the School of Design Basel and as a dancer and actress in 2021 from the Olten Acting School for the Deaf.
Lua has been a museum mediator in swiss sign language in Basel with Museum der Kulturen, Antikenmuseum and Tinguely Museum; as well as Augusta Raurica, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Stapferhaus Lenzburg, Helmhaus Zürich and Kunsthaus Zürich.
She is a co-founder and co-curator of «BelleVue» - Ort für Fotografie, a board member of «Sonos» - the Swiss Association of the Hearing Impaired, and a board member of «Movo» - Sign Language Theater of the Deaf & Hearing. Movo was honored with the recognition prize for cultural contribution by the Cultural Department of Canton Zürich.

Patricija Katica Bronić works as an actor, performer and director. After studying «Theatre and Media» at Universität Bayreuth and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, she trained as an actor at Hochschule der Künste Bern and graduated with a master's degree in «Expanded Theatre» in 2018. After her first permanent acting stint at the Junge Nationaltheater Mannheim and performing her own works together with her duo BRONIĆ/RÖHRICH, she is now making a name for herself in the independent scene and at municipal theatres. She creates captivating performances for both young audiences and adults, both independently and through collaborative projects. Using her extensive experience in performance development, Patricija adeptly employs both fictional and biographical approaches in her creative process. Her work Diese Nachricht wurde gelöscht., which she developed together with dramaturge and director Timon Jansen, has already been shown at ROXY Birsfelden, Fabriktheater Zurich and Schlachthaus Theater Bern. A production that deals with the silence of absent fathers and explores a heroine's journey of self-discovery. Patricija was the grantee of Arts Foundation Baden-Württemberg for Performing Arts 2022.
 

With a base in contemporary dance, somatic practices, and massage therapy, Tyra Wigg (they/them) makes choreographic performances that expand subjective corporeal perceptions. Tyra moved from Stockholm to Basel in 2020 and obtained a Master in Expanded Theatre at HKB, Bern in 2023. Their works have been presented in venues and festivals such as ROXY Birsfelden, Weld Stockholm, Shedhalle Zürich, BONE Festival, KASKO Basel, YUP Festival, Amore Basel. Currently they are in the creation of their choreographic project squeeze in co-production with ROXY Birsfelden, MDT Stockholm and PREMIO. squeeze premieres in November 2023 at Kunsthaus Baselland.

As a dancer, performer, and co-creator Tyra works, or has worked, with artists such as Gisèle Vienne, Shu Lea Cheang, Heiner Goebbels, Ernestyna Orlowska, Marina Abramovic, Alexandra Pirici, Inga Gerner Nielsen, Pontus Pettersson and Marie Jäger. Tyra is a steady member of the motherboard of Blasphemic Reading Soirées - a Basel-based nomadic platform for queer feminist reading and discussion culture.

Yanik lives and works as a musician and art-ist in Basel. He studied Fine Arts at Institut Kunst der HGK FHNW Basel (bachelor's degree) and at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rot-terdam (master's degree) and started a second master's degree in Composition and Improvi-sation at Musik-Akademie Basel, Institute of Classical Music, in 2022. His work blurs the boundaries between visual art, composition, improvisation and performance. As a com-poser he has written music for theatre (Schauspielhaus Zürich, Junges Theater Ba-sel) as well as for his own ensemble, band and solo projects (SOLAND ANGEL, MIR) and developed video soundtracks, perfor-mance soundtracks (Kunstmuseum Basel) and audio plays. The audio play Going To Switzerland by Stefanie Müller-Frank, for which Yanik contributed the music and production, was awarded the Overall Gold Award and the Gan Bearia Award at the HearSay - Audio Arts Festival (IRL). His first solo al-bum YUKI was released in 2021 on the Futura Resistenza label (NL/BXL).

Her interest of work is on transforming complex sociopolitical or ecological topics into performances, which offer the audience a direct involvement into the process or the performance itself. Her works range from large scale productions to 1:1 encounters or site specific projects. She has worked e.g. with Theater Basel, Schauspielhaus Zurich, Opera Zurich, Theater Neumarkt, Kaserne Basel or Schauspielhaus Wien. Her productions got invited to festivals such as Antigel Geneva, Politik im Freien Theater or Impulse Festival. Antje regularly works in international collaborations, most recently in Brazil, prior in Lebanon, South Africa and Kosovo. In Music Theatre she is interested in contemporary compositions. 

Antje holds the Prize of Festspiele Zurich in 2020 and was awarded with the Swiss Performing Arts award from the Ministry of Culture in Switzerland.