LGI/

We’re excited to announce LGI’s second cohort of Make a Start Residents for 2025

The Make a Start program provides 1- to 2-week in-studio residencies, for artists to explore new ideas or initiate early-stage developments. Participants have the opportunity to experiment, take creative risks, and push their practices into uncharted territory.

The selected artists will be in residence between August-December 2025.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Alexander Powers / Immediate Crisis: A life…
Alexander Powers is a Narrm-based artist experimenting across electronic music, dance and choreography. Her expansive practice invites the audience into cyclic rituals of physical exertion, ranging from endurance DJ sets that stretch through the night, entrancing sound works, and dance pieces that push the body to near exhaustion.

Her rigorous choreographic works have been performed at venues including Gertrude Glasshouse, Brunswick Mechanics Institute and The Immigration Museum, and via video at the Foundation Fiminco in Paris. In recent years she has focused on transforming music and club venues into spaces for performance, including her most recent full length work Alexander Powers performed at Miscellania nightclub in Melbourne as well as at The Vanguard in Sydney.

Charlie Lee / Camopansies
Charlie Lee is a production designer, artist, and performance maker from Aotearoa working across dance, theatre, costume and film. Led by queer/trans* and ecological methodologies, they make work which sits in in-between zones, precarious balances, and feelings of anticipation. Returning to dance over the past few years, they are interested in how design and materials can act as choreographic agents, and problematise totalising understandings of the body and world. Charlie loves found and weathered objects, symbols, toxic ecologies, disappearing acts, archival aesthetics and trash.

Eloise Wright / BodyFoaming Progress
Eloise Wright is a dance artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. Wright graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance (2021). She has worked with Jo Lloyd and Rebecca Jensen in several projects and secondments. Notably, Wright performed in Jo Lloyd’s Collision with Tasdance and GUTS (2022). Wright’s practice uses ecological thought to place the body amongst systems. Wright is invested in exploring the intelligence and frequencies of the natural world to expand upon further queer and sentient bodies through movement. With a gripping interest in choreographic encounters that can offer new action and logic, she honors the deep–personal–body archive and allows for imagination and memory recall to inform her practice.

gemma+molly (Gemma Sattler and Molly McKenzie)/ More than three
Gemma Sattler and Molly McKenzie are Naarm based artists, working primarily from their artistic partnership, gemma+molly. Their dual practice exists within, and is activated by, the medium of live performance. Anchored by individual and shared understandings of the potential of choreography as a structure independent of dance, they devise performance that choreographs attention, space and bodies, both animate and inanimate. gemma+molly rely on the necessary presence of their two bodies at work to conduct physical, durational and live installation experiments/performances. Underlying their practice is an embodied thinking towards cyclical, queered time.

Louella May Hogan / A Cornucopia Is A Corn Utopia
From Late Late country/Mildura, Australia, Louella May Hogan is a 2014 BFA (Dance) graduate of VCA in Naarm/Melbourne. She has since danced in Australia and Europe with Cyril Baldy, Shelley Lasica, Prue Lang, Rebecca Jensen, Sarah Aiken and Adam Linder. She danced with the Royal Danish Theatre’s process driven company Corpus 2018-2021 with Bobbi Jene Smith, Frédéric Gies, Kristen Ryg Helgebostad, Tilman O’Donnell, and unperformed works by Eleanor Bauer and Nature Theatre of Oklahoma.

Louella joined improvisation focused Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company in 2023. As well as AD Ioannis Mandafounis’ work, significant choreographers like William Forsythe and Thomas Hauart create new works on the company, touring to iconic international stages. As well as choreographic contribution from the role of a dancer/improviser, Louella also choreographs using her practice. Notably, a solo commissioned by Roskilde Festival and Snakes Slither, Cakes Sliver at FrankfurtLAB.

Oliver Savariego / Slapdash
Oliver Savariego is a dancer and choreographer based in Naarm/Melbourne. His work questions and queers aesthetic values within dance, blends “high” and “low“ art and examines the lines between inspiration, reference and appropriation. In 2018, he created Untitled with Stuart Shugg, in residence at Bennington College in 2018. He created Surface Area with Chloe Arnott in Prahran Skate Park as part of Melbourne Fringe 2018. In 2021, he created Creche, an online installation reflecting on childhood and nostalgia, reimagined for live performance in 2023 and presented by Dancehouse. Oliver has collaborated extensively within the Australian dance community. He is currently working with Lucy Guerin Inc, has performed with Phillip Adams Balletlab, Tasdance and Sydney Dance Company, and has worked with independent artists Shelley Lasica, Jo Lloyd, Melanie Lane, Sandra Parker, Harrison Ritchie Jones among many others.

Rhys Ryan / Distinction
Rhys Ryan is an independent dance artist working across performance, choreography and critical writing. He trained at VCA and has danced for Stephanie Lake, Russell Dumas, Anouk van Dijk, Kate Denborough, Phoebe Robinson, Siobhan McKenna and Chunky Move, plus international artists Michele Rizzo (IT), Simona Deaconescu (RO) and Davide Di Pretoro (IT). Rhys’ choreographic practice is best described as experimental dance theatre, and draws on his formal training in dance, law and politics to interrogate the systems and spaces we occupy. Credits include Distinction (Out of Bounds 2025) Na Trí Céilithe (Official Selection Dance (Lens) Festival 2025), SERMON (Dancehouse 2023), Bodylex(Dancehouse 2021 & Adelaide Fringe 2022 – Green Room Award nominated for Best Choreography), Condition (Dancehouse 2020) and Synthetic Upper (VCA 2017).

Sheena Chundee / Fractured Echoes
Sheena Chundee is a choreographer, performer, and sound artist whose work blends classical dance lineage with contemporary, interdisciplinary expression. Trained at The Royal Ballet School in London, Sheena performed with companies including The Royal Ballet, English National Ballet, Northern Ballet Theatre, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (USA), before relocating to Australia where she now leads her own creative organisation, Rebel Stepz Arts.

After a long hiatus from performing, Sheena returned to the stage in 2024 with TOUCH, a contemporary work exploring cultural identity which toured theatres across Victoria. Her current solo work, Fractured Echoes, marks a powerful return to performance and artistic authorship — unravelling perfectionism and reclaiming movement as a tool for emotional and cultural truth-telling. Blending projection, voice, and original sound (which she produces herself), Sheena’s work challenges traditional notions of virtuosity and explores what it means to perform identity in a digital, post-institutional world.

Tyler Carney-Faleatua / While We Wait

Tyler Carney-Faleatua: Tyler is a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker from Sydney, Australia who has been working professionally across Aotearoa, Australia and Europe for the past decade. She has collaborated with artists, choreographers and companies including Luke Murphy (Attic Projects), Michael Keegan-Dolan (Teaċ Daṁsa), Marina Abramović, Ta’alili, New Zealand Dance Company, Footnote New Zealand Dance and Atamira Dance Company. Her journey as a dancer has led her across the globe, performing and touring in productions across Aotearoa, Australia, France, Austria, Ireland, United Kingdom, USA, China, Germany and Switzerland.

Beyond her performance career, Tyler has been invited to share her movement practice with institutes and companies such as Rambert School, The New Zealand School of Dance, Unitec Institute of Technology, Atamira Dance Company, Footnote New Zealand Dance, Ev & Bow and Brent Street. Tyler is a graduate of The New Zealand School of Dance (2015) and was also independently invited to choreograph for their graduation season (2022).