About RESOLUTION 26: Billy Gigurtsis and Jana Melkumova-Reynolds, Julia Lupașcu and Brooke Sorensen

Two people wearing white shirts – one patterned with letters – and dark trousers stand with their backs to the viewer in front of a brick wall, arms at their sides, each balancing a book on their head.

Subject To Change

What happens when an interdisciplinary choreographer and sociology professor explore their shared hatred of the slogan “Just Do It” and interest in non-linear and crip time? No one really knows – but that’s what they will figure out with the audience in this part-choreographed, part-improvised performance-lecture.

They will explore the idea of being tentative, of not making up one’s mind, of perpetually working things out, and sometimes not seeing things through.

Expect to get your legs thinking, and your brains moving. But don’t get too hung up on these expectations: it’s all subject to change.

About Billy Gigurtsis and Jana Melkumova-Reynolds

Billy Gigurtsis is an interdisciplinary choreographer and performer with expertise in expressive forms of contemporary dance such as Tanztheater. He has exhibited work at venues including Siobhan Davies Studios, Rich Mix, Contact Theatre, and Riposte. He has worked internationally with and is currently a teaching artist for Candoco Dance Company. https://billygigurtsis.com/

Jana Melkumova-Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and the founder of Embodied Theory Lab, a movement and theory-based research project that brings together crip theory and dance improvisation. She is (tentatively) beginning to think of herself as a performance artist.

A woman’s smudged reflection in a mirror as she looks at herself, with withered flowers resting in the mirror’s top left corner, while the woman’s feet and the hem of her skirt are visible below.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

What is the one thing we all have in common? The fear of the unavoidable.

The grim reality of death is approached from a surprising standpoint, through a combination of irony, tradition and spirituality. Julia Lupașcu is starting from her Romanian roots and challenges the conventional perspective that we have on funerals, bringing humour and joy to cherish death as the culmination of life.

The work merges dance, live music and design in a world of duality and contrast. It is a complex theatrical journey that starts from the desperate desire to hold on, ending in the freedom of acceptance.

About Julia Lupascu

Julia Lupașcu is a Romanian choreographer, currently based in London. She has a mixed background in dance and drama, finding herself at the intersection of the two.

She has collaborated with theatres, as performer, choreographer and theatre movement director. Julia is constantly broadening her network, developing collaborations with experts from diverse fields, such as film, fashion, theatre or science. Her curiosity breaks the boundaries of conventional dance performance, striving to create worlds that act as both magnets and mirrors to audiences. Imagery and emotion are key to her work and practice, being inspired by topics that are always relevant to the human condition, approached with authenticity and vulnerability.

cast and creatives

Choreographed and performed by: Julia Lupașcu

Assistant Choreographer: Bogdan Zamfir

Cellist: Katie Harrison

Composer: David Balica

Architectural Designer: Ioana Oprescu

Four people in a bright room, three gazing intensely at the viewer while the fourth raises an arm above the middle person’s head, looking at them.

rubble/Fantasy

Four characters begin fallen and amongst fallen things. rubble/Fantasy explores the potential for rebuilding in a site of destruction. These characters, from four different lifetimes, find themselves here, together. As they journey across an ever-morphing landscape they decipher the secrets in the eyes of one another and let the swell of sound take them like a crashing wave. See the rust, ruin, rubble under their feet. Or maybe it’s snow. Or maybe it’s sand. Defiant eyes, cracked lips. Wounded and defensive, yet still soft. Searching. Magnetic. These Four are the pillars on which this world rests. They find power in each other.

About Brooke Sorensen

Brooke Sorensen is a choreographic and performance artist. Brooke crafts fantastical worlds which capture desperation and hope – two feelings she feels are integral to the human experience. Brooke creates potent visual landscapes for theatre, where viewers can almost taste the atmosphere which performers conjure up and move though.

She is a Masters (distinction) and Bachelor of Arts (first) graduate, as well as Deputy Head of Creative Development at MK Dance Theatre. She has shown and performed in works at The Place in London, La Villette in Paris, The Playhouse in Leeds, and Teatro Kismet in Bari, Italy.

cast and credits

Olivia Foskett, Dancer, National Dance Company Wales Apprentice (MA at NSCD) 2024-2025, BA Hons Graduate LCDS 2024.

Kaia Thowsen, Dancer, VERVE Company Member (MA at NSCD) 2024-2025, BA Hons Graduate NSCD 2024.

Brian Yam, Dancer, VERVE Company member (MA at NSCD) 2024-2025, City Contempory Dance Company Hong Kong Compay Member 2022-2024, BA Gratuate at Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts 2022

Jess Yeo, Dancer, Phoenix Dance Theatre Company Apprentice (MA at NSCD) 2024-2025), BA Hons Graduate LCDS 2024. NSCD- Northern School of Contemporary Dance, London Contemporary Dance School