Presented by Critical Path and Performance Space
We are thrilled to announce the participants in our 2026 Experimental Choreographic Program.
The recipient of the Experimental Choreographic Residency is Tamara Elkins.
Tamara Elkins works across performance, choreography, installation, video and textiles. Her practice centres on narrative and mythmaking, particularly matrilineal ritual, inherited gesture and the body as a site of spellwork and transformation.
During the ECP residency, Tamara will develop choreographic research for COLOSSUS, a video opera in collaboration with artist Katy B Plummer. They will explore how violence is held, rehearsed and made visible in the body, and how performance can function as a ritual space to interrupt and reimagine inherited systems of power.
The Experimental Choreographic Program supports the development of innovative, bold and experimental approaches to choreography. This two-week residency at The Drill Hall for an artist or collective offers financial, production, technical and creative support.
The recipients of the 2026 Experimental Choreographic Lab facilitated by Martin Del Amo are Phaedra Brown, Agustin Elaskar, Nasim Patel, MaggZ and Ryuichi Fujimura.
These five artists will receive two weeks of support whilst they explore their work in a collaborative setting and expand their choreographic skills and techniques.
Phaedra Brown
Phaedra Brown is a dancer, choreographer and producer whose practice brings movement, choreography and text into dialogue with materials beyond dance. Her work explores how bodies tell stories of shared human experience. Phaedra will choreographically examine the physical and psychological labour of trying and the joy, devastation and connection in human effort.
Agustin Elaskar
Agustin Elaskar’s work explores the intersections of queer identity, migration, nostalgia, ecosexuality and embodied pleasure. Agustin will develop an immersive choreographic enquiry using taste and flavour as sensory and relational scores, inviting audiences into guided acts of eating that generate collective curiosity through gestural intimacy.
Nasim Patel
Nasim Patel is an interdisciplinary artist working across choreography, performance, digital practice and writing. His work examines how movement and media can expose the tensions between dominant and repressed narratives in Australian history. Nasim will work on Tell Distance, an experimental choreographic method that layers live performance with jump-cut video to reveal the constructed nature of national identity and its colonial foundations.
MaggZ
MaggZ is a choreographer who works at the intersection of street dance, performance, site-responsive practice and experimentation. MaggZ will develop (!), a solo conceived as a performance game that examines w_acking dialogue through rule-based improvisation and choice architecture, exploring how constraint, play and decision-making can generate hope and reimagine the evolving archive of street dance.
Ryuichi Fujimura
Ryuichi Fujimura’s practice spans ensemble performance, solo work and interdisciplinary collaboration. Through the ECP Lab, Ryuichi will develop a research-led project that investigates smell as a primary choreographic material and explores how scent, alongside sound and touch, can organise time, space and attention without the presence of a performing body.
Portraits (left to right, top to bottom) Ryuichi Fujimura, photo by Vsevolod Vlaskine; Phaedra Brown, photo by Nat Cartney; Nasim Patel, photo by Simon McWilliam; Maggz, photo by Chiara Croserio; Agustin Elaskar, photo by Kate Holmes.
FEATURE IMAGE CREDIT: Tamara Elkins, photo by Eric Hoenig
FEATURE IMAGE ID: A portrait of a person standing in front of a sandstone wall with their hands in pockets.