As part of our ongoing commitment to supporting artists as they develop their choreographic practices and create new works, our Moving Forward Residencies offer dedicated time, financial support, and tailored guidance to help artists refine projects that are nearing an outcome.
At the culmination of their in-studio period, each Moving Forward Resident will present a showing of their work or share their artistic process through a workshop, talk, or publication.
LGI’s cohort of Moving Forward Residents for 2026 includes Caroline Meaden, Chung Nguyen, Emma Riches , Harrison Cook, Jenn Ma, Phillip Adams and Sarah Aiken.
Learn more about each artist and what they’ll be working on during their time at WXYZ Studios in 2026.
Caroline Meaden, Broadcast (Working Title)
Broadcast is a solo dance piece centred on the act of scattering seeds. Its initially slow, meditative pace sets the scene for a gradual outward expansion—both in the scale of movement and in the way it occupies space. The choreography moves between a vocabulary of considered, delicate, and precise gestures, and a broader, increasingly urgent traversal of the environment. This work marks a new direction in Caroline’s artistic practice, drilling into the formal properties of her choreographic language and exploring the reflective and associative experiences these qualities can evoke for audiences.
During her Moving Forward Residency, Caroline will develop the sound design in collaboration with composer Kevin Lo, and refine the structure of the piece ahead of a performance outcome in late 2026.
Chung Nguyen, Fluid Memories
Fluid Memories is an interdisciplinary dance performance by choreographer and dance artist Chung Nguyen and collaborators that explore belonging through intersecting personal and political histories. Through dance, sound, video, and participatory elements, audiences are invited to consider notions of home, country, and embodied memory.
During the Moving Forward Residency, Chung and his collaborators will rehearse and develop the full-length performance, to be premiered in 2026 (details to be announced), as well as a durational performance in a public space within the City of Melbourne.
Emma Riches, Never Are
never are is a solo dance work choreographed and performed by Emma Riches. The performance becomes a kind of compost of itself; components break down, decay, and re-nourish as they are reused, reaffirmed, and reimagined. It places a magnifying glass over what already exists – giving up in order to regenerate, and tracing backwards in order to move forwards.
As Emma works towards a presentation season in Melbourne in 2026, she will continue developing the piece, focusing on an additional movement sequence to introduce a new layer of complexity to the unfolding composition, and collaborating on the sound design with Melbourne-based composer Rachel Lewindon.
Harrison Cook, MATA MATA II
During the Moving Forward Residency, Harrison will deepen and refine his choreographic work currently in development. This new piece emerges from the ongoing presence of his previous solo MATA MATA (PILOT 2025, The Blue Room Theatre & STRUT Dance 2026, Boorloo), which summoned the taniwha of his ancestral awa, the Taieri River. That earlier work became a movement-based karakia—a conjuring of ancestral presence, trauma, mauri, and transformation through his Kāi Tahu lineage. MATA MATA II continues this line of inquiry, tracing the layered currents of Harrison’s identity as a takatāpui Māori person raised away from his cultural roots.
The residency will offer the focused space, provocation, and cultural safety required to bring this work into sharper form, with care, integrity, and readiness for future audiences.
Jenn Ma, revolve & return (迴)
revolve & return (迴) is a solo performance woven into a visual installation, an ongoing conversation between language, memory, and the body. Moving through the cracks of a fractured mother tongue, the presence of a widowed mother in Taiwan, and the shifting ground of diasporic identity in so-called Australia, the work lingers on how intimate lives carry the pulse of wider worlds. The expression of Jenn’s Taiwanese identity is a constant negotiation, one that lives in the flesh, inscribed through history yet alive with the possibility of being resisted, reshaped, and reimagined.
This residency will be a pivotal moment to gather threads from previous residencies into a full-length work with a creative team. Jenn will be refining movement, dramaturgy, and installation design, deepening how voice and body intertwine to bring revolve & return to a fully realised, pitch-ready form.
Phillip Adams, The Nancy Project
At 60 years of age, Phillip Adams is creating The Nancy Project, an introspective solo work exploring queer identity and the aging body. The Nancy Project offers a space of artistic renewal as Phillip commences a significant transformative phase of his creative practice and begins to shape what comes next.
In this development Phillip will draw on lived experiences (emotion in motion) emerging through a process of improvisation and text-based intuitiveness. The process involves documentation of long-form improvisation, becoming both a record of score-building and the emergence of fixed choreographic frameworks.
Sarah Aiken, Spanning
Spanning is a kaleidoscopic choreography of sound, movement, light, mirror and projection. Working with warped acrylic mirrors which bounce, bend and invert projection, shadow, text and silhouette across the space, layering and distorting everything to create a surreal and complex world of shadows and reflections. The work is an attempt to reach into and across real and imagined voids and the distances between reality and illusion.