The Artist’s Body and Movements of the Times

※ Free; registration opens in October.

In every era, artists respond to, reveal and even foreshadow how we navigate the present and future through their thinking and practices. The body, as a language and a medium, is the performing artist’s most direct vehicle for enabling us to reimagine and rethink social and cultural realities. This forum explores how the body, during live performances, transforms real-world experiences and conveys messages of our times, as well as how performances intervene in and shape the world in which we live. 

Moderator｜River Lin

Working across the contexts of theatre, dance, Live Art, visual art and queer culture, River Lin is an artist-curator based in Paris and Taipei. He’s initiated and directed several projects at Taipei Performing Arts Center including ADAM (since 2017), Camping Asia (since 2019). Since 2023, he has served as Curator of Taipei Arts Festival. Currently he is also Guest-Curator of 2025 Biennial de la Danse de Lyon, Co-Curator of Indonesia Dance Festival, Guest-Editor at OnCurating Journal and Curatorial Board at Curating in Performing Arts, the University of Salzburg.

Panelist｜Marie Schleef 

A theater director whose work centers on the unknown, forgotten, and unseen. She is particularly interested in staging the work of female authors that has never been performed in the German-speaking theater world. Her multimedia approach plays with minimal language use and time and space manipulation, often through slow motion.

After growing up in a trilingual family in Germany and Austria and attending high school in Eswatini, she studied theater and performance at Bard College in New York and directing at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. She subsequently worked as an assistant director at Volksbühne Berlin for artists such as Susanne Kennedy and Yael Bartana.

She works in both the repertory theater systems of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and the off-scene. Her work has been performed at the Volksbühne Berlin, the Ballhaus Ost, the Kosmos Theater Vienna, the Schauspiel Köln, the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, and the Burgtheater. It has also been invited to numerous festivals, ranging from Theatertreffen and Radikal Jung to Autor:innentheatertage at Deutsches Theater Berlin. She is also the recipient of the CHANEL Next Prize, awarded to ten innovative artists worldwide, as well as the Kurt-Hübner-Regiepreis for young directors.

In the 2025/2026 season, she will premiere two new pieces: “ARE YOU READY TO DIE?”, a devised performance about female incarceration and the death penalty, at Schauspiel Zürich; and Shirley Jackson’s iconic 1948 short story "The Lottery" at Schauspiel Essen.

Panelist｜Ruth Childs 

British-American dancer and performer Ruth Childs was born in 1984 in London. She grew up in the United States where she studied dance and music. In 2003 she moved to Geneva to finish her dance training with the Ballet Junior de Genève. Following this, she started working with many internationally known choreographers and directors including Foofwa d’Imobilité, La Ribot, Gilles Jobin, Massimo Furlan, Marco Berrettini and Yasmine Hugonnet. Since 2015, she is also working on a re-creation and revival project of the early works of her the aunt, the American choreographer Lucinda Childs.

In 2014 she founded her company Scarlett’s in order to develop her own work through dance, performance, and music. Scarlett’s favors intimate and collaborative artistic processes, cultivating intuition and the indefinable. In 2016 the state of Geneva awarded her a scholarship and research residency in Berlin of 6 months to develop her own work. Her first stage piece in collaboration with Stéphane Vecchione, The Goldfish and the Inner Tube, premiered in April 2018. She premiered fantasia, her first solo at the ADC, Geneva in October 2019 and then Blast! in 2022 at the Festival de la Bâtie in Geneva and Fun Times in 2024 at Arsenic in Lausanne. From 2023-2024 Ruth was the associated artist at the CCN2 Grenoble.

Ruth is currently one of the artists in residence at Arsenic in Lausanne. Scarlett’s/Ruth Childs benefits from a joint support contract from the City of Geneva/Canton of Geneva/Pro Helvetia (2024-2026).

Panelist｜Ola Maciejewska

A Polish choreographer and dancer based in France. She focuses on the frictions between materiality and ephemerality, as well as movements and the conditions surrounding them. Based on the convergences between dance and the visual arts, she emphasizes the serpentine dances invented by Loie Fuller to encourage reflection on metamorphosis, the natural world, and the hybrid nature of embodiment.
Between 2016 and 2018, she was associate artist at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen Normandie and her works Bombyx Mori (2015) and Dance Concert (2018) were chosen for the New Settings program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. In 2020, she received a grant to research Rolf Borzik’s scenography at the Pina Bausch Foundation archives.
In 2022, she earned a fellowship from the Watermill Center founded by Robert Wilson, and was associate artist for the project Campement artistique pour littoral. That same year, her project FIGURY (przestrzenne) received the Gallery Prize from the Nadežda Petrović Gallery in Cacak (Serbia).
In 2023, she created On Time, a performance-installation, and a solo The Second Body. Her new choreographic piece ONGOING will premiere in 2026 at the Théâtre Mac Orlan as part of the DañsFabrik Festival by Quartz Brest in France.

Panelist｜Liu I-Ling

 ©Eric Politzer

LIU I-Ling [liou-ee-ling] 劉奕伶, a contemporary dance artist from Taiwan, was a longtime member of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company (USA) from 2008~2019. Liu has been creating her choreographies which focus on reminiscence, trauma, social observation and re-definition of body “technique”. In 2022, her duet work “... and, or...” won the Jury Prize of the Yokohama Dance Collection Competition I(Japan) and has been touring in France and USA. She received the support of the Cloud Gate Art Makers Project in 2021 and showcased the solo work “Normal Life” in da:ns festival 2022. “Game On” was commissioned and premiered by the 2023 Taoyuan Iron Rose Festival and Camping Asia at Taipei Performing Art Center in November 2023. In 2024 Liu made her first evening-length solo “Turn Out” with the support of the National Theater and Concert Hall (Taiwan) and was nominated by the Taishin Arts Award. The same year, she was a recipient of the The Place X Weiwuying Artist Residency. She is currently a Part Time Assistant Professor at the Taipei University of the Arts.