Choreodrome: making progress

Eleanor Sikorski, Annie Hanauer, Oluwatosin Omotosho, Joe Moran, Isaac Ouro-Gnao & Kesha Raithatha

Three grainy blue photographs of dancers on a blue background.
Artwork by Moe Nakagawa

About Choreodrome: making progress

Six choreographers share works-in-progress in a series of short performances, developed through The Place’s Choreodrome residency in Summer 2026.

Expect beautiful, bold and bonkers experiments as these artists try new things in our intimate studio theatre! This year's artists are Eleanor Sikorski, Annie Hanauer, Oluwatosin Omotosho, Joe Moran, Isaac Ouro-Gnao and Kesha Raithatha. Choreodrome: making progress takes place across two evenings, both of which end in a facilitated feedback session with the choreographers and performers.

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Dance Art Journal on Choreodrome: making progress (formerly Touch Wood)

Performing 8 September

Eleanor Sikorski

Eleanor Sikorski works in dance as a performer, choreographer, rehearsal director and teacher. She is also a filmmaker and comics artist. Eleanor’s choreographic work includes solo performances, stand-up sets, music videos, group pieces, and sculpture. She combines formal elements with humour and off-kilter storytelling.

Eleanor’s piece proposes the Rube Goldberg Machine as a choreographic and scenographic device. Named after their creator, cartoonist Rube Goldberg, the machines are chain-reaction contraptions which perform simple tasks in overly complicated ways.With this light-hearted work she hopes to reframe function as expression and expose the pleasure of bringing impossible contraptions to life.

https://eleanorsikorski.com/ | Instagram: eleanor.sikorski

Annie Hanauer

Annie Hanauer (she/her) is a contemporary dance artist who choreographs, performs, and facilitates dancing in many different settings. She has worked across countries and contexts for 18 years, with an established presence on international stages as both a dancer and choreographer. As a disabled artist often working with other disabled/crip collaborators, Annie is interested in how bodies in motion can joyfully disrupt ideas of normativity.

One, Two is a new work in development responding to the fetishisation of women with limb differences & disabled people more widely. In the tangle of digital life, artistic power, choice, and crip pride, this project asks: How do we claim the power of our female, disabled bodies, and define them on our own terms? One, Two is imagined as a performance for a group of dancing rockstars, channeling our beautiful crip desires into a joyful, punky, sleek, rowdy and tender dance work.

www.anniehanauer.com | Instagram: ah_dance

Oluwatosin Omotosho

Oluwatosin Omotosho is a Nigerian-born, London-based Dance Artist and Choreographer working across theatre, commercial dance, film and television. Her practice fuses hip-hop, street styles, Afro-dance, jazz and contemporary with spoken word and text. She's worked with artists including Little Simz, TYLA, Lenny Kravitz, RAYE, Cleo Sol and Chaka Khan, performing on stages such as Glastonbury, BRIT Awards and MTV EMAs.

The Aunties: The House of Masks is a bold and hilarious exploration of ‘aunties’ within African diaspora communities - not those related by blood, but the women who appear at every family event, armed with opinions, judgments and hidden secrets. Blending hip hop, street styles, spoken word and text, the work explores the tension between cultural expectations and modern identity. These aunties critique, advise and entertain, alongside a central character whose journey of self-discovery challenges inherited rules.

Instagram: oluwatosin.om & theaunties.hom

Performing 9 September

Joe Moran

Joe Moran (he/him) is a British-Irish artist and choreographer with a wide-ranging practice incorporating performance, film and choreographic drawing, alongside participatory and curatorial projects. His work centres the body as a site of complex subjectivities and political unrest, engaging queering as a critical strategy. His practice is informed by expanded choreography, with a growing focus on the physicality and theatricality of emotion.

Now We Are Dead, is a new dance work for the stage navigating themes of loss, displacement, and cultural identity. Prompted by Joe's personal experience, including a growing dislocation from Irish culture and community following the death of his parents, the work moves beyond the personal to consider wider systemic desolation and making at a time of socio-geopolitical collapse that feels unfathomable. Research is informed by queer pessimism, asking what is made possible when we admit defeat, and foregrounds queer defiance and the defiance of emotion.

https://joemorandance.com ... | Instagram: joemorandance

Isaac Ouro-Gnao

Isaac Ouro-Gnao is a Togolese-British multidisciplinary artist, somatic trauma therapist, mental health scholar-activist, and freelance journalist. His practice blends magical realism, Africanfuturism, and West African spirituality, exploring childhood, grief, trauma, memory, and mental health. Trained in hip hop, contemporary, and Africana dance techniques since 2008, he has collaborated with leading choreographers and companies such as Alessandra Seutin and Punchdrunk. His performance work spans dance, films, and interdisciplinary collaborations in the UK and internationally.

'you’re a man now, boy' is a hip hop and Africana dance theatre production. The work delves into how childhood trauma, childhood adverse experiences (ACEs), and positive childhood experiences (PCEs) shape adult mental health, and how we find healing – individually, collectively, holistically, and spiritually.

https://www.isaacourognao.com/ | Instagram: isaacourognao

Kesha Raithatha

Kesha Raithatha is a boundary-pushing dancer and choreographer whose work merges the precision of Kathak with contemporary fluidity. Her voice is rich, textured, and unapologetically experimental, reimagining contemporary South Asian dance. With roots between the UK and India, and as a Work Place artist at The Place, resident creative at Curve Theatre Leicester and Associate Artist with Aakash Odedra Company, Kesha moves between cultures and creative worlds. She is driven to spark global dialogue and create bold, socially relevant work that explores the unspoken and the unseen. Her performances invite audiences into surreal spaces where movement becomes memory, ritual, and transformation.

Threads (working title) is a choreographic work exploring how clothing shapes identity, memory and cultural authorship through a contemporary South Asian lens. Drawing on enclothed cognition, it considers how what we wear alters behaviour and embodiment, while garments act as living archives — carrying labour, lineage and the imprint of bodies that came before.

https://kesha.dance/ | Instagram: kesharaii, tiktok: kesha.raii

About Choreodrome

Choreodrome residency and commission programme provides dance makers with a nurturing space, time, and resources to develop new ideas.

Find out more about Choreodrome

  • An image of Eleanor Sikorski on a blue background with her name below. Image description: 37yr old white woman with straight brown hair, short blunt fringe and black buttoned up shirt looks straight at camera. The picture is taken indoors. There is a distant white wall behind her. Her expression is formal but friendly.
  • An image of Annie Hanauer on a blue background with her name below. Image description: Annie, a white woman in her late 30s with shoulder-length light brown and grey hair and blue-green eyes, standing next to a brick wall, looking straight into the camera with a relaxed neutral expression. She's wearing a black t-shirt and on her left upper arm a white sock that fits under her prosthetic. Light spills in from the right side of the frame and through a blurry window in the background.
  • An image of Oluwatosin Omotosho on a blue background with her name below. Image description: A woman with short cropped hair is smiling into the camera with her eyes closed and her head tilted to the right. Her shoulders are bare and the image cuts off below her colarbone
  • An image of Joe Moran on a blue background with her name below. Image description: Joe Moran, courtesy of the artist Portrait of a white man with short light brown hair and a trimmed beard, wearing a blue sweatshirt, seated indoors and looking directly at the camera, with bookshelves and artwork in the background.
  • An image of Issac Ouro-Gnao on a blue background. His name is in bold black letters below the image. Image description: A studio portrait of a young man with dark brown skin, wearing a black sleeveless top, photographed against a solid black background. He has short natural afro hair and a light goatee, and gazes slightly upward and to one side with a calm, composed expression.
  • An image of Kesha Raithatha on a blue background with her name below. Image description: Black and white image of a woman, her head is tilted to the right and the image cuts off just under her shoulders. She is looking at the camera with a serious look.

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