The Guests

Emma Bigé studies, writes and translates across the various fields of dance, queer studies and environmental inhumanities. Holding a PhD in philosophy from the École normale supérieure, she is a dancer and a curator, and she is notably the author of Mouvementements. Écopolitiques de la danse (La Découverte, 2023) and Écotransféminismes (with Clovis Maillet, Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2025). A member of the editorial collective of the journal Multitudes, and of the t4t and dansmalangue collectives, she has co-translated works by Sara Ahmed, Karen Barad, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jack Halberstam, and Fred Moten & Stefano Harney. She teaches dance and epistemology in art schools and choreographic centers.

Melbourne-based Joel Bray is a proud Wiradjuri dancer, maker and choreographer, and Artistic Director of Joel Bray Dance. He performed with Anouk van Dijk, Falk Richter, Roy Asaf and Niv Sheinfeld & Oren Laor, and in Australia with CHUNKY MOVE. Joel’s dance-theatre encounters in unorthodox spaces spring from his Wiradjuri heritage, and use humour to engage audiences in rituals about sex, history, trauma and healing. Joel has made stage and screen works which have toured to major festivals and galleries, in Australia, New Zealand and Germany.

Victoria Hunt is a Māori-Australian dancer, choreographer, director, dramaturg, filmmaker, and photographer whose work delves into Indigenous Oceanic epistemologies. Her practice reinstates IndigiQueer futurity—rooted in Mātauranga Māori and BodyWeather—within the politics of Rematriation. Her acclaimed solo Copper Promises: Hinemihi Haka was nominated for several awards and toured internationally to LIFT (UK), IMPACT15, PuSh Festival, Banff Centre, National Arts Centre, and Public Energy (Canada). KŌIWI, a durational performance commissioned by the Art Gallery of NSW, manifesting a 'taniwha protector' of taonga, which is now travelling the world bearing messages, omens, prophecies, and warnings. A founding member of De Quincey Co. (2000–2024), Hunt is a leading figure in Australia’s BodyWeather practice.

Thomas DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a research lab that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. He believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. He also convenes the Black Performance Theory working group as well as the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. Creative work includes Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty, Monk’s Mood: A Performance Meditation on the Life and Music of Thelonious Monk, fastDANCEpast, reVerse-gesture-reVIEW and re-Orientations, an Afrofuturist fantasy which premiered at Links Hall, Chicago, May, 2024. slippage.org

Philipa RothfielPhilipa Rothfield is a writer, philosopher, dance reviewer and movement practitioner. As a philosopher, she writes on French philosophy, political philosophy, feminism and post-modernism, specialising in philosophy of the body. She is author of Dance and the Corporeal Uncanny, Philosophy in Motion (Routledge, 2020) and co-author of Practising with Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). She practises a number of movement modalities, including dance improvisation, Tai Chi, Qi Gong and Yoga. As a reviewer, she currently writes for The Saturday Paper. She holds a number of academic positions at La Trobe University in Australia and the University of Southern Denmark.

Leisa Shelton is an independent artist, educator + curator working in Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Europe and India. Her practice and pedagogies foreground collaboration and trans-disciplinarity with a focus on questions of contemporary cultural identity and processes to enable greater social valuing the role of artists within our society. She was curator for Australian artists with the Venice Performance Art Week, initiated and curated the Taiwan eXchange, dance program and has built diverse multi-lingual teams of Scribes for festivals across Australia, in the UK, Canada and Berlin. www.fragment31.com

Dr. June Oscar is a Bunuba cultural leader and long term advisor to Marrugeku. Her remarkable decades-long career has taken her from a small office in a cattle station in a tiny Western Australian town, to serving a five-year term as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner. June was the first woman to hold this role in its 20-year history and used her position to advocate for, and empower, indigenous women and girls across Australia. Today, June continues to champion the rights of First Nations women and girls through the new First Nations Gender Justice Institute, based at the Australian National University.

Françoise Vergès is an activist, political theorist, curator and writer. She writes on the after-life of slavery and colonization, decolonial feminism, the museum, and climate disaster and regularly works with artists. She is currently Senior Fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Center for the Study of Racism and Racialization. For the 2025 Bannister Fletcher Fellowship, she is organising workshops on Imagining the Post-Museum, with in London, the Whitechapel Gallery, Mosaic Room and the Sarah Parker Remond Center for the Study of Racism and Racialization at UCL, and in Paris, Cité internationale des arts and ULIP. francoiseverges.com