This series of co-productions will focus on supporting dance artists transition from producing work for small and medium-sized stages to creating large-scale productions.

In 2021, four dynamic artists were the first to be selected as part of the Scaling Up programme and created new works co-produced and toured at several partner festivals.

Oona Doherty creates intense, compelling works that appeal for societal change, with her distinctive choreographies having sparked international attention, earning her multiple awards and rave reviews. For nearly two decades, Silvia Gribaudi has focused her artistic research on the social impact of bodies, be they trained, oversized or aging, and has demonstrated how diversity and humour can bring freedom to the stage. Marco da Silva Ferreira will be working with a cast of over ten dancers, drawing from European folk dance footwork to urban dance styles in search of a rebellious and carnival-like collective body. With his new work, Amala Dianor brings together three West-African choreographers and nine talented African dancers to construct an exquisite corpse-inspired multi-faceted being.

In the following years of the Big Pulse project, Sonya Lindfors brought to the stage an interrogation of the spectacle of otherness as well as the intricate relationalities between modernity and colonialism, Sabina Bočková & Johana Pocková / POCKETART explore the intersection of femininity, identity and self-discovery, connecting us to our past by revisiting childhood experiences, and Euripides Laskaridis explores a multitude of intriguing dualities, bringing to life the material and the spiritual, the dreamlike and the nightmarish, the conscious and the subconscious. 

Find out more about the Big Pulse Scaling Up artists:

Oona Doherty (Northern Ireland / UK)

Silvia Gribaudi (Italy)

Marco da Silva Ferreira (Portugal)

Amala Dianor (Senegal / France)

Sonya Lindfors (Cameroon / Finland)

Sabina Bočková & Johana Pocková / POCKETART (The Czech Republic)

Euripides Laskaridis (Greece)