COMPASS Makers Space residency in Tranås June-July 2024
The new COMPASS residency in Tranås in June-July 2024, hosted by Kultivera and supported by Region Jönköping, has selected emerging choreographers Maja Fock and Sandy Harry Ceesay as artists in residence. During this residency, Maja and Sancy will focus on developing their solo performances and they will have the opportunity to present excerpts of their work at the end of the residency period. Throughout their creative journey, they will receive guidance and mentorship from Lee Brummer.
We are proud to present the artists here:
Photo: Julian Thomas
Maja Fock
Maja Fock was born and raised in Torup, Halland. She graduated from Balettakademien Göteborg in 2022 and today works as a freelance dancer/choreographer. Maja has recently produced a dance film called "Perfect Piano" which was shown at Folk och Kultur in Eskilstuna 2024. She has worked with choreographers such as Anton Lackhy, Toby Kassel and Jarek Cemerek. In October 2023, she was admitted to DIP as the only Swede by the international choreographer Anton Lachky. She is a fiery person with a sense of humor and loves to laugh. Maja's way of working with art is to always find new ways to move. She dives deep into feelings and ways of conveying them. During the residency, Maja will work with mental and physical boundaries in dance. She will explore the mental and physical limits of how fast or slow one can move and how this interacts with the music.
You can see more about Maja here:
Photo: Jeffrey McIntosh
Sandy Harry Ceesay
My name is Sandy Harry Ceesay, I am a choreographer and writer based in Linköping, Sweden who deals with choreography as an expansive medium, i.e choreography as the movement or correlation between one thing and another.
The physical part of my practice deals with the dichotomy of structure and improvisation. And centres around notions of fiction or fiction making, the production of imagery or scenario mostly through the lense of queer practices, as well as indigenous practices inherent to West Africa being part of the West African diaspora.
The writing part of my practice deals the same topics, but has different outputs (novels, short stories, poems), although the writing work tends to bleed into the physical portions of my practice as all of these mediums come together in performance works. These works deal with questions such as a performer's autonomy on stage or audience-performer dynamics; what are the stories we tell of certain bodies, who is the author of these stories? Is it possible to write the story of one’s own body? And if so; how?
The urgency for this residency lies in my desire to have a designated space and set time to deep dive into the physical practice itself. Exploring ways to expand and articulate already existing practices and ideas. The practice to further examine is called VERBING, and is connected to the research work of the piece “Black is a verb, but only on earth”. The work is a part of an ongoing research series being explored since 2017. I have no expectations other than to have time to meet the practice in a new context. All my artistic work lies in the meeting of things, people, objects and materialities. It is in these environments it becomes operational and starts to function.