CommonLAB 2025 kicks off in Lisbon

Following the open call in September 2024, a group of eight artists were selected to take part in CommonLAB: Bruno Brandolino, Eslam Elnebishy, Maria Mercedes Flores Mujica, Keli Freitas, Shirley Harthey Ubilla, Sepideh Khodarahmi, Emmanuel Ndefo and Massandje Sanogo.

The first stop of the Common Stories travelling laboratory is Lisbon and it brings together emerging artists from the performing arts who are addressing the dynamic notions of identity and diversity in a changing European society, both at a professional and personal levels.The group of eight artists will be working in the studio at Espaço Alkantara between 5 and 18 May, accompanied by Gaya de Medeiros and Sarah Lewis-Cappellari.


[Workshop with Gaya de Medeiros]
Me for Dinner
Me for Dinner is a workshop that explores the performer’s relationship with autobiographical material, identity, and audience interaction. Drawing on a range of embodied and vocal practices, it invites participants to reflect on their presence and performative strategies through movement (inspired by Gyrokinesis), voice work (influenced by Francesca Della Monica), and performative approaches such as Vogue. The sessions also include group discussions around performer–audience dynamics and a viewing of excerpts from Dad for Dinner, a performance that integrates an audience member into the piece. Designed as a space for creative exchange, vulnerability and experimentation, the workshop encourages participants to engage in honest dialogue and shared artistic inquiry.


[Workshop with Sarah Lewis-Cappellari]
A Preliminary Guide to Artistic Kinship
This workshop will delve into some of the consequences/politics of the socialized roles we play as an artistic collective. We will employ performative techniques to explore possibilities for artistic collaboration by utilizing a set methodology where we will rotate authorship and temporarily inhabit each other’s artistic identities. As a group of artists there will be a process where we irreverently "steal" one another's artistic identities. How will the work be read/impacted/informed if we release ourselves from past notions of artistic identities? How can we begin to understand an artistic approach so that we might find a common language for artistic collaboration? In this workshop each participant will share an artwork that they have conceptualized/realized and then someone else will present it as their own.

After Lisbon, the lab will make its way to Cologne (from 2 to 15 June, africologne, Germany), Cairo (from 8 to 19 October, D-CAF, Egypt), and Bobigny (from 20 October to 1 November, MC93, France).

Gaya de Medeiros is a trans woman, dancer, drag queen, choreographer, producer, and director. She is trained in animation, ballet, contemporary dance, and dramaturgy. She danced with Companhia de Dança do Palácio das Artes for nine years. Gaya has created three solos (É o amor outra vez, Proteína Desnaturada and After Party) and was a cofounder and producer of Rede Sola de dança. She has choreographed for Drag Taste Lisbon (2019-2021). In Portugal, she has worked with Gustavo Ciríaco and Tiago Cadete, among others. In 2021 she founded BRABA, a platform that aims to support iniciatives in the trans/non-binary community.

Sarah Lewis-Cappellari (PhD, UCLA) is a researcher, curator, dramaturg, and teacher whose work engages the interface of performance, contemporary art, colonial visual economies and Black and Caribbean Studies. Previously based in Berlin, she worked with the art & science collective Mobile Academy as one of its primary curators and researchers. Sarah has also researched and worked with collaborative art practices as a member of the performance collective LEWIS FOREVER (which presented work at Performance Space 122 and the New Museum in NYC, among other venues) independently with SOIT in Brussels, Agora and Sophiensaele in Berlin, and Tanzhaus NRW in Düsseldorf. Most recently she has been invited to guest lecture at Maumaus and the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, as well as in the curatorial master’s program at Zurich University of the Arts. Sarah currently teaches critical theory to master film students in co-creation and innovation for social change at the IFS in Cologne.