Lead Artist, Choreographer

Yuiko Masukawa is a Japanese choreographer based in Naarm. Her work brings together the inclusive and iconoclastic ethos of contemporary performance with her deep expertise of ballet. She is a current recipient of the The Australian Ballet’s Telstra Emerging Choreographer’s Award for her work 3. 

After education in Japan, America and Canada, she moved to Australia and studied at West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) before launching a professional career as a dancer and choreographer.

She was a principal artist with Melbourne City Ballet for 2014-2019, touring across Australia, New Zealand and Japan performing principal roles for more than 15 seasons. As a choreographer with MCB, she created works for each contemporary season as well as more than 10 full-length ballets for Melbourne City Youth Ballet in her role as artistic director. Her work was nominated for outstanding achievement in youth dance at the 2018 Australian Dance Awards.

In 2020, she undertook choreographic secondments with New York City Ballet and Milwaukee Ballet, supported by the Ian Potter Cultural Trust. 

In 2022, she presented Running Machine (Nominated Design/Technical Achievement in the 2023 Green Room Awards) an international, interdisciplinary work at Arts House between Japan and Australia and, why we are, who we are in collaboration with T.Shriraam and undertook a choreographic secondment with Lucy Guerin.  In 2023, She presented the first development of her work Yugen at Australian Ballet as a part of Frame Festival.

In 2024, Yuiko created a full-length work for the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). She is the recipient of the Naarm/Solo exchange program for 2025/2026, which will take place in both Indonesia and Australia. This program is facilitated by Lucy Guerin Inc. and EkosDance Company. She presented her new work Standing on a Rising Wave at The Australian Ballet’s Bodytorque season in Nov 2024.

She is grateful to be a recipient of support from Creative Victoria, Creative Australia, City of Melbourne, Ian Potter Foundation, Lucy Guerin Inc. (Make a start residency), Dancehouse (On Residence), Brimbank Council (Be bold residency) and the Sidney Myer Foundation.

Composer

Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey are Australian artists who create unexpected situations for listening. They have a long-term highly awarded collaborative practice. Their work is driven by a curiosity about listening in human and non- human ecologies and seeks to evolve and engage with new processes and audiences through public and participative interventions. They work with emerging technologies, cultural groups, sites, and experts across practice and ensemble-made processes. Their current creative obsessions include acoustics of the dark, existential risk, and ecological and cultural impacts of practice. Maddie and Tim are based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.

Maddie and Tim’s works have been presented by major festivals and contemporary art spaces, including Setouchi Triennale and Kinosaki Arts Centre (Japan); Busan Sea Art Biennale, Ansan Arts Festival, and Seoul Street Arts Festival (Republic of Korea); Brighton Festival and Science Gallery London (UK); Sonica Festival ; Edinburgh Festival and Counterflows Festival (Scotland); ANTI Festival and Oulu Capital of Culture (Finland); Prague Quadrennial (Czech Republic); Theatre der Welt (Germany); Ars Electronica (Austria); Melbourne Festival, Perth Festival, Sydney Festival, MONA FOMA, ACCA, ArtsHouse, Melbourne Recital Centre, Substation, Sydney Opera House and Bundanon, and Science Gallery Melbourne (Australia). Their awards include the national Australia Council Experimental Arts Award, APRA-AMCOS awards for Experimental Music, GreenRoom Awards for Sound and Hybrid Arts, Melbourne Festival award and an Honourable Mention Arts Electronica.

Visual Artist

Ai Horikawa is a Japanese painter born in Osaka and a member of the Kyoto Painter Association. She holds an MFA and BFA in Japanese Painting from Kyoto Seika University. Ai's work has been exhibited in major venues across Japan, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. Her notable exhibitions include "Setsuryosha Firenze Prize ExhibitioSetsuryosha Firenze Prize Exhibition," "New Nisshunten," and the "All KANSAI Exhibition." She has received several prestigious awards, such as the Kyoto Kachokan Award and the Setsuryosha Firenze Prize.

Dancer

Jessica trained at the Australian Ballet School and holds an Advanced Diploma of Dance (2003). She has danced as a company artist with The Australian Ballet and Sydney Dance Company, touring extensively throughout Australia, Europe, the UK, the USA, South America and New Zealand. In 2011 she was awarded an Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant to undertake artistic development in Europe and India. Her performance repertoire is vast and includes works by George Balanchine, Rudolph Nureyev, Krzysztof Pastor, Kenneth McMillan, Stanton Welsh, Rafael Bonachela, Graeme Murphy, Stephanie Lake, Alexander Ekman, Gideon Obarzanek, Lee Serle, Gabrielle Nankivell, Alice Topp and Jacopo Godani. In 2023 she performed as a guest artist with The Australian Ballet as part of their 60th birthday celebration seasons in Melbourne and Sydney. She also collaborated Yuiko Masukawa in creation and performance of her work “Yugen” for Frame festival in Melbourne. She is committed to honesty and sustainability in her relationship to environment, community and history through the expressive capacity the body and approaches dancing as medium for embodied presence offering endless possibilities for intimacy, freedom and human connection.

Dancer

Samuel Harnett - Welk, is a Non-Binary Australian dancer living and working with Aspergers.
Their extensive experience with leading Australian and International dance artists creates a framework for them to explore improvisation and performance. Samuel has trained with Rambert Ballet (UK), The Royal Ballet (UK), Sydney Dance Company, Australian Dance Theatre, and The Australian Ballet. As a company artist Samuel has worked and performed for Daniel Jaber and Dancers, Melbourne Ballet Company, Chunky Move and Phillip Adams Balletlab. Highlight’s for Samuel include dancing in William Forsythe’s “One Flat Thing, Reproduced” for STRUT Dance in 2017, creating and performing in ARCA in a SEED Resdiency at Komunitas Salihara (Jakarta, Indonesia) alongside collaborator Natalie Allen in 2019.
Since then, as an independent artist Samuel has worked, created and performed with STRUT Dance, Opera Australia, Loughlan Prior, Prue Lang, Kristina Chan, Melanie Lane, Natalie Allen, Anastasia La Fey and Harrison Hall.

Samuel has contributed to the wider arts/dance community through working on written publications such as Andrew Westle’s “Turning Pointe, Gender equity in Australian Dance/Delving into Dance and Harald Giesler's “2.1 - there is no dance which is a prior true”.
Samuel also teaches contemporary Ballet for Lucy Guerin Inc.

Samuel has a developed craft that is unique and powerful in its expression, speaking to a relationship between queerness and the classical form spoken through an autistic body. An artist loaded with an incredibly rich history and sensitivity, their work seeks to use the body as a reflective mode of communication to find bold and complex physicalities that reflect a thoughtful rendering of the human experience.

In 2022 Samuel was appointed as a dance panel member of the Greenroom Dance Awards

Costume Designer

Jack is a designer/tailor/pattern maker/artist that works with fine fabrics to make fine clothing. Jack’s practice is about exploring what it means to cut fabric, or leave fabric, and to put it on a body.

Jack’s practice is about the movement & ergonomics of cloth on the body.

Jack explore cutting techniques and dressing systems from crescendoes in <me, where garments reach unimaginable ends to simple processes. Jack is particularly interested in the disparate development of the Japanese system of garments made from non-cut lengths of cloth, contre to the prevailing global western systems cutting cloth into tailored garments.

Projects with which Jack is involved in include, but are not limited to costume for dance, garments for performers of musicians & events, garments for ceremony, garments for gatherings, garments for the everyday. These works include both publicly displayed expressions and private procurement for personal use.