Artist Committee

Throughout our history, CDS has continually asked how artists can be at the centre of decision-making, in accordance with our founding mission to be member-led. In December 2020 a group* of CDS member artists proposed to establish a new, paid steering committee, selected using a randomised lottery and made up of Global Majority Heritage and Disabled/neurodivergent artists.

We are thrilled that a trial of this model is now in full swing and since November 2022 the committee has met for a full day each month, advising on artist support, programming and the organisation’s ongoing development. The five artists work alongside staff, trustees, and members as representatives of their artist communities, supported by producer and facilitator Frances Morgan. 

We see the group as CDS’ first step towards more equitable, creative, inclusive and artist-led governance. As we continue to invest in this project’s future, we’ll seek to share our learning and influence broader change in the sector. 

You can hear more from the committee in their blog post.

We’re driven by an eagerness to consider new models of leadership that decentre power and redistribute it to artists who have previous been excluded from decision-making and resources.

Alice Tatge, CDS Members Committee

Alice Tatge (she/her)

Alice Tatge is an italian-american-czech choreographer, performer and director working in the field of combined arts since 2004. Her practice investigates the sensorial realm via a plethora of multimedia disciplines, somatic practices and dance techniques, exploring the politics of the body, questions of gender and cultural identity.

Her work has been exhibited at Hayward Gallery, Southbank, Tate Modern, Barbican, ICA, London U.K., as well as internationally across Europe and the US. Artists she has collaborated with include : Tino Sehgal, Meg Stuart, Lundahl & Seitl, Xavier Le Roy, Mårten Spångberg, and Punchdrunk.

Claudia Palazzo (she/her)

Claudia Palazzo is a London born and based artist and dancer working across the intersections and contradictions of dance, performance art and film using her body as a responsive site to her environment and territory.

Her work exists somewhere between the nightclub, gallery, and street. It is often poetic, feral, meditative and structurally violent. Aesthetically her work is influenced by my roots in nightclub culture, inner- city concrete dwellings and psychophysical training. She seeks to establish charged connections and subliminal understandings with an audience in order to process and harness our collective and individual sense of joy, sadness, resistance, power and endurance.

Jose Funnell (they/them)

Jose Funnell (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, dancer, performer and activist based in London, who works to support migrant rights, the LGBTQIA+ community, the movement for black lives and the anti-racist struggle. Their research based practice considers the pedagogical potential of embodiment and emancipatory potential of performing agency within contexts of historic negation.

Often in collaboration with Carlos Maria Romero, they facilitate somatic workshops in order to empower queer people of colour. They have presented solo work at the ICA (London); Les Urbaines (Lausanne, Switzerland), Steakhouse Live (London), Slap Festival (York), The Albany (London), CLAY (Leeds) and Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski (Warsaw).

Valerie Ebuwa (she/they)

Valerie Ebuwa is a freelance dance artist, activist, writer and model from East London. She started her training at Lewisham College before obtaining a BA HONS degree from LCDS. Amongst others she’s recently worked with; Clod Ensemble, Vincent Dance Theatre, Bhebhe and Davies and Jamie xx. As a maker, she has choreographed and curated ValUE, a multi-layered project created in order to offer different perspectives on the black female image. ValUE is the first material archive to be featured at the Siobhan Davies Studio.

Her writing has been featured in The Stage Magazine and is a regular contributor to I am Hip Hop magazine; a printed and online publication championing Hip Hop culture. Her work has been featured in Crack Magazine, Glass Magazine and The Earth Issue.

Zjana Muraro (she/her)

Zjana Muraro, originally from NYC, is a London based dancer with a digital practice, making performances that explore more than human worlds. She is inspired by futuristic curiosities about societies and bodies and her research is inside the entanglement between embodiment practices, contemporary dance and the tech digital spaces of today and tomorrow.

She’s also a registered somatic practitioner and her writing has been recently published in journals throughout the UK on the topics of the human body in relation to digital environments including VR; mental health and social media; displacement and heterotopias.

*We want to offer a special thank you to the CDS Working Group (2020-21): Jose Funnell, Rachel Gomme, Joseph Morgan Schofield, and Claudia Palazzo; with support from Ruth Holdsworth and J Neve Harrington. These artists engaged in a 6 month research process exploring the needs of artist-members, which led to the formation of this committee.