Announcement: Summer Residencies 2021 Artists

Using resources from our second grant from the Culture Recovery Fund, Chisenhale Dance has been able to offer nine Member artists a paid one-week residency in our studios. For the Summer Residencies we received 41 applications for 9 residencies, which is roughly a quarter of the Membership. We are happy to announce that the artists who will be in residence between July and September this year are:

Alisa Oleva, Colleen Bartley, Jaivant Patel, Joseph Funnell, Katsura Isobe, Rukeya, Sarah Poekert, Valeria Tello Giusti and Yumino Seki. 

You’ll be able to find out more about each of these artists’ practices on our social media platforms over the coming weeks.

These artists were chosen randomly, in the spirit of ‘names out of a hat’. This was an exciting opportunity for CDS to trial a different kind of selection process, which sought to reduce competition, limit the labour involved in writing applications, and select artists to receive resources without placing value judgements on their work. This comes as the second experiment with alternative processes in recent months. The first was our Artist Support Fund, which supported artists gravely affected by COVID-19, in which all applicants were invited to decide together how to distribute funds amongst themselves. A report including learning and recommendations from this process is now available here.

Note on inclusivity in the selection process

It was crucial to the CDS Staff team that people with protected characteristics were properly represented within the chosen artists, and so we included a question asking applicants to self-declare this. 75% of Members who applied self defined as having one or more protected characteristics.

People from the Global Majority (term explained in IncArts BAMEOver Statement) and disabled people were still greatly underrepresented in the applicant pool. We therefore added a preliminary shortlisting step as part of the random selection to ensure that people with these protected characteristics were fairly represented.