Present Tense is a five-day teaching residency that approaches performance as group research: not as the culmination or output of a practised process, but as a way of knowing in the act. How does a performance stay alive to its own enquiry? Across movement, theatre-making, living text, sound, research and live art, the programme explores performance through bodies, relations and exchange. What happens when text becomes embodied, when images are experienced rather than viewed, and when an artist's output becomes an extension, transformation or obliteration of self?

What does a performance risk, withhold or reveal? Performance makes the body count, bringing forward the voice, strange gestures, and the ways we stand, read and look. We turn to improvisation and ritual, forms that remain responsive to the present. Attention is considered as a material to be shaped: as clay, as heat, as an alchemical ingredient with conductive properties.

Every performance is an act of making public, an act of publication. But not all bodies enter the public register under the same conditions. The programme asks how social roles are imposed and performed, and which bodies are held inside or outside the sphere of recognition. It questions the fixed, diagrammatic relationship between performer and audience, and how the retention of subjecthood by the performer might offer subjecthood to the public. Study here is knowing with others. Performance means the whole of what a performer carries into the work: time folding, several biographies at once, transformation permitted rather than an essence defended. The question is not resolved in advance. It acquires a body, enters time and is witnessed.

Programme Curators

Partner Organisations

Artists and Contributors

Artist and Participant Biographies

Born in Taipei in 1971, Lin Chiwei is a transdisciplinary artist who received academic training in French literature, cultural anthropology and media art. Since the early 1990s, Lin has been involved in the Taiwanese counter-cultural scene. He was a founding member of noise band Z.S.L.O. and responsible for the programming of various alternative art festivals. At the same time, Lin explored the realms of religious music and art, notably temple sculpture and Taoist rituals, through intense research and field studies. These experiences, combined with his practice in noise performance and electronic music composition, developed into critical positions toward contemporary art practices. Since 2004, Lin has worked on the Tape Music and IDCM (Interhuman Dynamic Coordinated Models) series of works – synchronous protocols which allow individual autonomy in the forming of collective intelligence that leads to complex sound works. In his 2012 book Beyond Sound Art – The Avant Garde, Sound Machine and the Modernity of Hearing, Lin denies the term ‘Sound Art,’ and provides a holistic view blurring the boundary between human culture and technology. Lin’s art works were shown in various biennales and museums including Tate Modern, Pompidou Center, PSA Shanghai along with other non-art sites including local community projects, private residences, public schools, factories, churches, temples, bars and live venues in different countries around the world. Lin Chiwei lives and works in Shanghai, Taipei, and Paris.

Maite de Orbe is a Spanish, London-based artist working with photography, performance and moving image. Their practice is focused on the complexity of identity making, touching on otherness and belonging. Working collaboratively with dissident communities, de Orbe’s practice uses a documentary visual language at first that then lures into fantasy and world making to tell stories of real life through emotional textures, portraits and landscapes. As they examine rituals of contemporary culture, their work is equally raw and soft, deeply connected and fascinated with blending high vs low culture, intimacy and the sublime. In 2024, De Orbe started creating MOMOSTAR, an opaque character exploring violence, tenderness, gender, belief systems, mythology and contemporary symbols, it is a surreal exercise to really see oneself.

Lalu Delbracio is an artist working with performance, installation and photography. Her artistic practice unfolds through live action, material process and duration, exploring questions of time, transformation and embodiment, often shaped by ideas of queerness and ecology. Alongside this she is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the London College of Communication. She lives and works between the UK and Uruguay.

JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, Ellis asks what stuttering can teach us about listening, generosity, and justice. Concepts that organize the artist’s practice include: unknowing, improvisation, fugitivity, illegibility, inheritance, opacity, prayer, gap, contradiction, aporia, eternity, unpredictability, interruption, silence, and devotion. Ellis researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. The artist’s body of work includes: contemplative soundscapes using saxophone, flute, dulcimer, electronics, and vocals; scores for plays and podcasts; albums combining spoken word with ambient and jazz textures; theatrical explorations involving live music and storytelling; and music-video-poems that seek to transfigure archival documents.

A poet, writer, performer and activist, Edka Jarząb practices deep listening as a starting point for sound activism using the voice as a bridge between the public and private, and singing and improvisation as a practice of resistance. Edka co-creates the Warsaw-based community Radio Kapitał and is the author of poetic radio plays and interventions, such as the phantom protest Wielogłos [Polyphony] created in collaboration with Diana Lelonek. From 2020 to 2021 she was a resident of the experimental studio WORM in Rotterdam; and permanent collaborator of the interdisciplinary platform Q-O2 based in Brussels. Working with voice, radio waves, field recording and electronics, she creates atmospheres in, among other places, the Dance Theatre in Warsaw. Edka has participated in the exhibition Post-peace at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart; Gotong Royong; Things We Do Together in CCA Warsaw; Sound & Participation symposium in Belgium and many other events. She was the curator of the program Sirens’ Song at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Jarzab is co-author of Warsound/Warszawa published by U– jazdowski, collaborates with the magazines Glissando and Wakat, co-creates the sound collective Critical Band Ensemble and the feminist improvising group SYRENY, practicing extended voice techniques.

Bhanu Kapil was born in the United Kingdom and lives in the United States and the United Kingdom. She is the author of a number of full-length works of poetry/prose, including The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015), and How to Wash a Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020). Kapil received the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry in 2020. She has taught at Naropa University and in Goddard College’s low-residency MFA program, and is a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

Joseph Kohlmaier is an artist, designer and teacher. He is currently Associate Teaching Professor in history and theory at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University. He is the founder and creative director of several collectives, organisations and educational projects including experimental choral ensemble Musarc (2009–present), Field Studies (2010–17, 2025–present), graphic design studio Polimekanos (with Stefan Kraus, 2000–2020), and independent imprint Cours de Poétique. It is through these frameworks that Joseph’s practice evolves and where it has had the greatest impact by creating spaces for people to experiment with new ideas. As a curator and producer, Joseph has commissioned and worked with emerging and established artists, and collaborated with leading arts organisations in the UK and Europe on projects that have transformed the landscape of education, contemporary music, and performance. Joseph’s work is multifaceted, situated at the intersection of different disciplines and activities that oscillate between solitary practice and collective performance. It is animated by the question of how we learn, how thought is related to symbolic form, the agony and potential of collective acts, the general ecology of the chorus, and marginalised ways of thinking such as the role of embodiment and felt sense in the production of knowledge.

Bianca Pina is a poet, object maker and ideator. Her practice spans writing, spatial design, energy work and group facilitation, held together by an ongoing inquiry into perception, meaning-making, and the movement between inner and outer worlds. She is the founder and programmer of Present Tense, a community space in Newington Green dedicated to poetry and poetics. Present Tense envisions a world where poetics is a practice that transcends disciplines, where the affordances of poetry are present in every creative endeavour, well-prepared meal, and thoughtful conversation.

Carolyn Roy has been a member of Musarc since 2023, participating as a vocal performer and writer in most of their projects since joining. She lives with unilateral hearing loss, which, as well as prompting explorations of mis-spoken words, (bad) singing and soundings, has produced a particular sensitivity to resonance – specifically the way that our bodies are touched and moved by sound and the more subtle resonance generated by bodies in shared space. Carolyn is a London-based, freelance dancer and writer with a PhD in dance, who works in the independent dance sector. As a practitioner channelling the somatic processes and understanding we use as dancers through other art forms, her body of presented/published work includes poetic and critical texts, sound narratives, film and photographic projects as well as live performances and political actions. In recent years her practice has focused on examining philosophical concepts through the materiality of bodies. Performance and text projects (2018–2022) explored what it is to be with others in this world, what it is to be-with as dancers, the politics (and pleasure) of dancing, with reference to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Être Singulier Pluriel. She is currently working in collaboration with dance-maker Amy Voris using scores derived from Experiential Anatomy as a way of encountering propositions made by Anne Dufourmantelle in Puissance de la douceur. Carolyn has performed in work by Gaby Agis, Marina Collard, Keira Greene, Derek Jarman, Graeme Miller, Florence Peake, Pacitti Company, Tino Sehgal, and Margarita Zaffrilla Olayo. She has been a visiting lecturer at the Architectural Association, Bartlett School of Architecture, East London University, Cambridge University, Lincoln University and teaches regularly at Trinity Laban, LCDS and Independent Dance, as well as leading workshops for non-dancers in community and healthcare settings. Carolyn is an activist member of artist-led collective, Chisenhale Dance Space.

Marf Summers is an artist, architect, and leatherworker whose work explores themes of trans identity, domesticity, and class, working in mediums including silicone, sandpaper, and hard candy, turning a subversive eye on the mundane through butch-camp sensibilities. Their current body of work ‘Standing Stone Butch’ collides the unknowable landscape of prehistory with 20th century constructs of queer identity, incorporating performances that reveal the urgent intersection of trans embodiment and manual craft practices. Marf’s work has been exhibited internationally and they are currently a member of the Conditions Studio Programme.