Five LCDS Graduates receive Propeller Residency commission

Every year for the summer months, The Place, London’s leading centre for dance and performance, opens its studios for artist residencies, to create new work and research new ideas.

This year five additional residencies are offered to recent graduates as part of a suite of new Propeller projects, designed to give recent graduates a lift to kickstart their creative careers in the crucial time period straight after graduation.

The five graduates this year are Jess Yeo, Mia Ostinelli, Maddy Westhead, Alex Whelan and Esther Kate Bedeau. They will each receive a commission of £3000 and 2 weeks of residency time in our studios to develop a 15–20-minute piece to present at Resolution 2027.

Jess Yeo is an artist working across performance, choreography and facilitation. She has toured with Phoenix Dance Theatre and performed at La Villette (Paris), ArtsCross (Taipei) and with Avant-Garde 2. With roots in Contemporary, Ballet and Street-Related Practices, Jess uses versatility as a tool for communication. At London Contemporary Dance School, she received the Cohan Scholarship before her MA at Northern School of Contemporary Dance. Her choreography has featured at Sadler’s Wells, Leeds Playhouse and with National Youth Ballet. In 2019, Jess co-founded MK Dance Theatre, creating full-length works in her hometown. Above all, Jess centres psychological safety, rigour and care.

Her project FEAST is an exploration of rituals around eating, food rules and table manners, informed by feminist frameworks and queer phenomenology. Centering the table itself as a catalyst for quiet rebellion, the piece unfolds as a round-table discussion where women question, challenge and negotiate autonomy. In doing so, the work asks what it means to show up to the table each day with the resilience to move from scarcity to abundance. FEAST stands as an offering and an ode to the women who set the table, sustain others and are now bold enough to ask for seconds.

Mia Ostinelli is a choreographer and movement artist based in London, originally from Switzerland. With a background in acting, somatic practices and gymnastics, she completed a professional training in contemporary dance in Milan before graduating from London Contemporary Dance School in July 2026. Through a feminist lens, her choreographic work explores themes of encounter and discomfort. Irony often emerges in her research to express the nonsensical nature that she perceives in the society she lives in. Her practice engages bodies and set design as elements to create visual compositions that resonate on a physical and political level.

Her project explores images and customs related to traditional Western weddings from a feminist and queer perspective. Following an interest in themes that provoke conflicting feelings and thoughts, the research focuses on fascination, excitement and romanticism together with a sense of ridicule and repulsion towards a ritual that is very heavily influenced by patriarchal values.

Without trying to bring awareness to an already widely challenged topic, nor to share a specific message, the work intends to play with a multitude of feelings surrounding weddings, creating a sensation of unease and excitement all together.

Maddy Westhead is a queer movement artist based in London, raised in Cornwall, graduating with a BA from LCDS in July 2026. With an interest in making work that feels both surrealist and radically human, they aim to reflect on their relationship to the world and people around them. Often using improvisation and discussion, combined with a co-created movement language, they work alongside collaborators to collage fragments of scenes, dance material, and set design elements, into a complete work. This tends not to adhere to a particular aesthetic, but instead responds to an ever changing amalgamation of interests, collaborators and contexts.

Their project will explore and play with themes of connection, memory, and identity, anchored around specific table situations. Approaching something common through an absurdist lens, this project aims to explore how movement, in collaboration with design, can connect with and provoke audiences. Transforming the stage space and transporting viewers into a bizarre, camp, and tender world - that is both bewilderingly new, yet strangely familiar. Questioning what a dinner table can mean, how it can be transformed, and what it might become.

Alex Whelan’s work stems from a practice learnt from his mother, which she calls “nebbing”: a slow, pensive form of people-watching. Through the lens of his queerness, this has evolved into a methodology of social and self-observation that underpins his artistic practice.
Driven by a desire to cultivate a sense of mutual understanding around life, love, and how we move through the world together, Alex creates works that guide both himself and his audiences through acts of self-proclamation, reflection, and recalibration. His practice seeks to uncover the beauty within everyday performativity and social choreography, examining the ways we construct ourselves in relation to others.

bumming the dj is a semi-autobiographical contemporary dance work in which Alex performs alongside a live DJ in an unnamed place and time. Built around the repeated attempt to get the attention of the DJ, despite their indifference, the work explores queer desire, longing, validation, and the performances we create for one another. Moving between performativity, fantasy, confession, and excess, bumming the dj combines dance, electronic music, and text to navigate intimacy, nihilism, self-performance and a dull, yet ever-present, desire for something more.

Esther Bedeau is a North London–based dance and movement artist whose practice draws on Ground Based Contemporary technique, Floorwork, and Breakdancing. She develops choreography through improvisation, games, and rule-based structures rooted in human connection. Influenced by socio-political themes, she creates collaborative work that combines playfulness and intensity, inviting audiences to reflect, discuss, and connect emotionally.

Drawing on masculine imagery from Renaissance art, Esther’s project explores how strength, power, and muscularity are embodied by women. Influenced by conversations around weight-loss culture and gender performativity, her work challenges the association of these traits with cis male bodies. Through intense, high-energy movement, two women assert their presence, celebrating strength power female physicality.

Previous graduates taking part in the Propeller Residency 2025 were Evie Longstaff, Company Sixth (Becca Dodd & Elina Wates), Ty Burrows and Lilah Bobak.

More information about how The Place supports emerging artists and graduates can be found here: LCDS launches a series of propeller projects for BA graduates | The Place