MAKE UP PRODUCTIONS - Key Persons
Antonia Baehr is a choreographer, performer, filmmaker and visual artist. Her works explore the fiction of the everyday and of the theatre, among other themes. She works together with various partners, frequently in the form of switching roles: from project to project, each artist alternately takes on the role of either guest or host. Baehr studied film and media arts at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, with Valie Export (1996) and obtained a DAAD-grant and a Merit Scholarship for the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. There she completed her Master in Performance with Lin Hixson. Since 2006, she has taught as guest professor at several European colleges. She has taken part in diverse group exhibitions (re.act.feminism, Center for Contemporary Arts Estonia Tallinn, Museo de Arte do Rio, MACBA Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, et al.); in 2012 the Neue Kunstverein Gießen showed her work in a solo exhibition. From 2006 to 2008 Antonia Baehr was associate artist at the Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers. From March to May 2013, The Beursschouwburg, Brussels, presented a programme comprising performances and films as well as an exhibition: "make up: at Antonia Baehr and Werner Hirsch's table". The works shown included those of artists who have worked over many years in various roles together with Hirsch and Baehr, as well as numerous works by Hirsch und Baehr themselves. In 2008, her book "Rire / Laugh / Lachen" was published, and "Abedecarium Bestiarium - Portraits of affinities in animal metaphors" was published in 2014. Her long-term collaborators include William Wheeler, Valérie Castan and Lindy Annis, among others, and more recently Neo Hülcker and Latifa La bissi. Her productions for the stage encompass "Holding Hands" (2001); "Un après-midi" (2003); "Cat Calendar" (2004), with Antonija Livingstone; "Larry Peacock" (2005), coproduced by Andrea Neumann and Sabine Ercklentz; "Merci" (2006); "Rire / Laugh / Lachen" (2008); "Over The Shoulder" (2009); "For Faces" (2010); "My Dog is My Piano" (2012); "Abedecarium Bestiarium" (2013); "The Wildes" (2014), coproduced by Keren Ida Nathan (Ida Wilde) and Henry Wilde (Antonia Baehr); "Misses and Mysteries" (2015), with Valérie Castan; "Normal Dance" (2016); "Röhrentier" (2016); "Exit" (2018); "Consul and Meshie" (2018), with Latifa La bissi; "Music for Dead Animals" (ongoing series), with Neo Hülcker, and "Die Besondere Perücke" (2020), with Lucile Desamory. In collaboration with Sabine Ercklentz, Baehr produced "Abecedarium Bestiarium. Affinitäten in Tiermetaphern", a feature for WDR 3 that was broadcast in February 2015; and in June 2015, "Misses und Mysterien" was broadcast as a radio play on WDR 3. Baehr is the producer of the horse whisperer and dancer Werner Hirsch, the musician and choreographer Henri Fleur, the composer Henry Wilt, the ex-husband of Ida Wilde and composer/performer Henry Wilde, a.o.
Arantxa Martinez is a performer and choreographer based in Berlin since 2003.
Carola Caggiano grew up in a very little town on top of a beautiful mountain in Spain. In this royal place the biggest castle had 2,673 windows. Franco´s corpse is lying there under a 150m high cross. The place was scary, so she moved to London, squatted houses and learned some circus tricks and performed on the streets. Back in Spain, she studied Geology in Madrid. But first after moving to Berlin she found out how much fun it is to play with audio waves in theater. So she became a sound designer and has been happily working in many theaters all over the world since 2011, often accompanying Antonia Baehr. Some of her latest collaborations include works with Antonia Baehr and Lucile Desamory (" Die besondere Perücke"), with Kris Lemsalu in the Stonian Pavilion during the Venice Biennale 2019 or with the theater collective Hauen und Stechen, as a sound designer and performer in our version of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. In december 2020 Carola worked with Antonia Baehr and Jule Flierl in their project "Die Hörposaune" (still in progress).
Carola Caggiano is a very passionate Taiji Quan practitioner and piano player.
Henri Fleur is a choreographer and landowner in France. He studied Philosophy, German Literature, horse breeding and viniculture. 2000 he received the golden medal for the best wine the "Coteaux du Quercy". In his free time he appears as the dancer and horse-whisperer Werner Hirsch, the film-maker Reiner Werner, the Drag Queen Frau Böse, and mostly as Ida's husband Henry Wilde. Henri Fleur occasionally appears and performs as Werner Hirsch.
Ida is a writer, director and visual artist, with degrees in the Western tradition of Fine Arts, Philosophy and Literature. Her locus of geographical relation and cultural reference centers on the historical, political, aesthetic and botanic ties between Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. Writing and directing for Stage, Film, Dance and the Arts, aligning herself with certain outdated genres such as operetta, lyric poetry, passion plays, plein-air painting and pamphleteering. Her work is centered around storytelling as a form. Thematically she focuses on social behavior, radical communality and queer femme identity, which began with her daily practice of historical female drag, as Ida Wilde. During this time she invented Henry Wilde and the Wilde family, and wrote and illustrated the book; A Very Wilde Story; The True Story of the Marriage of Ida and Henry Wilde. She co-created the performance of the book;The Wildes, A Victorian Salon, in collaboration with Henry Wilde.
Ida has long been experimenting with collective and sustainable forms of working structures in the arts. Recently she has turned to plants for healing and comfort.
Ida is deeply engaged in independent study of medicinal plants and the history of healing arts in the Eurasian and Mediterranean Basin. She loves to knit, read, garden, save seeds, dry her own herbs and speak often to friends and family, yet sadly she also knows very little about many other things.
Isabell Spengler is a film maker with a particular interest in the overlapping fields of film and performance. She investigates ways in which performances can be transposed into films and various forms of "live film".
In her collaborations with other artists, Spengler sets up situations, in which ideas and wishes are visualized by the means of photography, drawing, performance, costume design and three-dimensional models. The works frequently generate humor by emphasizing discrepancies between preconceived and factual realities.
Born in Berlin, Isabell Spengler studied experimental film at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin with Valie Export and Heinz Emigholz (Meisterschülerin 1999) and at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles (MFA, 2001) with James Benning and William E. Jones.
From 1999 to 2004 she lived in Los Angeles. She has received a DAAD and an Eastman Kodak stipend among other stipends and awards. She currently teaches experimental film at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin.
Her filmography includes "Father, Mother, what should I film today?" (2012), "Osmosis of the Unicorn" (2009), "LINT LENT LAND" (2009), "The Pitch" (2008), "Telepathy Experiment I" (2007), "Syncpoint" (2007), "Lantouy" (2006), "Permanent Residents" (2005), "The Natural Life of Mermaids" (2004), "Transformation in the Land of Enchantment" (2003) and "Psychic Tequila Tarot" (1998).
She has collaborated with her life-long friend Antonia Baehr on numerous film and performance productions, including a.o. work in the performance-group "ex machinis" (1994-1996), the music video "Syncpoint" (2007), the video installation "Telepathy Experiment I" (2007) and a lecture on performance and film called "Two Friends and More Than Four Walls" (Berlinale 2010).
Since 1998 Isabell Spengler's work, including films, video installations, photography and performance, has been exhibited in film festivals and exhibitions worldwide.
Jule Flierl is an artist from Berlin/Germany who works with choreography and the voice. Using choreography and somatic singing methods, her scores unsettle the relationship between seeing and hearing: what you see is not always what you hear, and what you hear is not always what you see. She revives and continues the legacy of Valeska Gert, avant-garde dancer from 1920's Berlin, who first conceptualized the genre Tontanz: to dance with one's voice.
Jule is fascinated how conceptions of the body change over time and that the voice as a technology of the self always finds new relations to the body.
She asks herself how the baroque Bel-Canto voice would inhabit the gestures of romantic ballet (Operation Orpheus 2016), how the anti propaganda of Valeska Gert's dancing tones in the Weimar Republic would have sounded (Störlaut 2018) and how to choreograph the separation of body image and vocal sound of Katalin Ladik's avant-garde performances during the Cold War (U.F.O. 2021).
Flierl collaborates with choreographer Antonia Baehr "Die Hörposaune" live / film (2022) and ToneDance artist Irena Z. Tomažin "U.F.O. - Hommage to Katalin Ladik" (2021). Her group choreographies "School of Attunement and Tactlessness"(2022) and "Time out of Joint"(2023) develop grotesk bodies and dissonant collectives.
Her work was featured at Impulstanz Vienna 2021/2018/2016, Tanzplattform Munich 2020, Steirischer Herbst Graz 2019, NEXT Valencienne 2018, Legs/La Raffinerie Brussels 2018 and Rencontres Chorégraphiques Paris 2018, La Panacée Montpellier 2016, Tanztage Berlin 2016 amongst others.
She worked with Meg Stuart, Tino Sehgal, Martin Nachbar, Gintersdorfer/Klassen, Sergiu Matis and Anna Nowicka a.o.
2015 she received the DanceWeb Scholarship for Impulstanz/Vienna. In 2016 she was introduced as "newcomer" and in 2018 she was nominated as "hope for dance" in the German "Tanz" Magazin. In 2019 she received the award for best choreography at the Solo Choreografico Festival Frankfurt am Main for "Dissociation Study". 2021-2024 Jule is part of the APAP Network.
Jule graduated from SEAD-Salzburg academy for contemporary dance, holds an MA in choreography at EXERCE Montpellier and is a certified teacher of the somatic voice method "Lichtenberger Methode". She initiated and co-hosts the voice performance series FROM BREATH TO MATTER in Berlin since 2017 and co-published a Podcast of interviews with artists who interweave voice and choreography as continuation of the live event series in 2021.
Mixing genres and redefining formats, the creations of Latifa La bissi bring onstage multiple off-stage / off-field elements channeling different figures and voices. The staging of these voices and the face as a vehicle of minority states ties into the danced portions of the work in Self portrait camouflage (2006) and Loredreamsong (2010). Continuing her thematic study of archives, she created Écran somnambule and La part du rite (2012) based on German dance from the 1920's. Pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse (2016), co-signed with the set designer Nadia Lauro, created visions, landscapes and images, combining excess, monstrosity, the beautiful, the random, the comic and fear. Since 2011, Latifa La bissi has been Artistic Director of the Extension Sauvage artistic and pedagogical program and festival in rural Brittany. In 2016, a monography on the ensemble of her work was published by the Editions Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers and Les presses du réel. In 2018, she creates with Antonia Baehr the performance Consul et Meshie. She also gather in 2019 for the video Moving Backwards by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, presented in the Swiss Pavillon of the 58th Venice Biennale. The same year, her creation White Dog is shown at european festivals (Marseille, Tanz im August - Berlin, Automne à Paris, festival TNB Rennes), before a french and international tour. In 2021, the creation Ghost Party (part I) is a duet-performance with the Dutch videomaker Manon de Boer, which will forms a pair with a film by Autumn, Ghost Party (part II). Both parts will be exhibited in FRAC Bretagne. At the same time, Latifa La bissi prepares a new piece with the brasilian choreographer Marcelo Evelin. This almost all-night party, entitled La Nuit tombe quand elle veut will be created by Fall 2021 at the Festival TNB in Rennes. In 2022, Fugitive Archives a group piece will be created for the CCN Ballet de Lorraine.
Lindy Annis studied in New York at N.Y.U.'s Experimental Theater Wing and has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1985. She produces performance and theater works, acts as dramaturge and curator, and writes texts for the stage. Her long-term series, The Body Archive, is a collection of performance, gallery and stage compositions focusing on emotional body gestures; their iconography, their evolution through time and their role in contemporary western society. 2017 Annis expanded her practice to include sculptural formats, generating a palate of objects often concerning the human figure in expressive pose. The works are in paper, porcelain and bronze or as drawings, photographs and installations. She has also been engaged in an extended artistic cooperation with the artist Antonia Baehr in the form of a recurring dramaturgical exchange.
After studying the law books carefully, Mirjam Junker dropped them and arrived in Berlin in 1992, to the squats and idealism of the early days. When the summers spent building and constructing dreams with friends was over, she left for an adventure sailing the Atlantic seas as a deckhand, to Italy for olive tree climbing, through London for a season or two of queer squatting and on to Tel-Aviv and Akko for a bit of romance. When she returned to Berlin, she jumped centre-stage for a few dedicated years of avant-garde performance art with a group called Primärenergie while starting to work as a bouncer at some of the toughest clubs in town. In the meantime she completed three and a half years of boat-building studies and found a dream job in a wood workshop, sanding and whistling all day to the radio, spending weekends at the door, training Aikido seriously in between. Thirteen years married and a passionate football fan, she has become recently enamoured of Liverpool FC (a passion she shares with her brother-in-law).
As a visual artist and set designer, Nadia Lauro has been developing her work for several decades in various contexts (scenic spaces, landscape architectures, museums). She has conceived set designs, environments, and visual installations with strong dramaturgical power, thus generating new ways of seeing and being together. Nadia Lauro has collaborated with the following international choreographers and performers: Vera Mantero, Benoît Lachambre, Frans Poelstra, Barbara Kraus, Emmanuelle Huynh, Fanny de Chaillé, Alain Buffard, Antonija Livingstone, Latifa Laabissi, Jonathan Capdevielle, Laeticia Dosh, and with Jennifer Lacey with whom she co-authored numerous projects. Les Presses du Réel published "Jennifer Lacey & Nadia lauro -dispositifs chorégraphiques" by Alexandra Baudelot.She recieved a New York Dance and Performance Award (The Bessie) for her visual installation in $Shot (Lacey/Lauro/Parkins/Cornell). In 1998 she founded Squash Cake Bureau with the architect Laurence Cremel to develop landscape design and urban furniture projects.She also designed concerts (Cocorosie, Gaspard Yurkévitch, Dani Siciliano). She has conceived the installations / performances: "Tu montes", "As Atletas", "I hear voices", and has developed scripted environments in museums, theater houses, and art galleries in Europe, Japan, and Korea. For the 4th edition of the New Festival at the Centre Pompidou, she has presented "La Clairière" (Fanny de Chaillé / Nadia Lauro), an immersive visual environment designed to hear "Khhhhhhh", Imaginary and Invented Languages. Since 2014, Nadia Lauro is associate artist to the Extension Sauvage Festival (Latifa Laabissi / Figure Project).
Steffi Weismann crosses the border between visual art and music in connecting bodies, things and sounds in space. Her focus is on audio performances, mixed media compositions, participative scores, and performative sound art. In recent years, the transfer of tactile experiences into sonic processes has played a central role.
Since her studies at the Berlin University of the Arts, she has maintained an international concert schedule with the group Maulwerker. Beside of her solo works she has been collaborating with Annette Krebs, Georg Klein, Özgür Erkök Moroder, Antje Vowinckel and Çiğdem Üçüncü amongst others. Since 2019 she is co-curating the series Ready Making with Janine Eisenächer at Errant Sound, project space for sound art Berlin.
Ulf Sievers is a musician and lives in Berlin. He studied Politics and German in Hamburg. For many years he was the guitarist for the Hamburg-School band Blütenstaub. After finishing his degree in 1999 he moved to Berlin and since then, influenced by the local scene, has been making electronic music on a laptop. In order to ‚balance out‘ for the last two years he has been taking trumpet lessons and secretly listens to Jazz in his free time. Ulf is produced by Sabine Ercklentz.
Job Titles:
- Founding Member of Make Up Productions Together With Antonia Baehr
Ulrike Melzwig, born 1978 in Leipzig, studied cultural work at the school for applied sciences in Potsdam where she graduated in 2003. Besides her studies she worked for several years in the artistic direction of Schaubühne Lindenfels, Leipzig.
Ulrike Melzwig is founding member of make up productions together with Antonia Baehr. Since 2003 she has been working as a production administrator for almost all make up productions-projects.
In 2004/05 she organised together with Martin Nachbar the open conference MODE05 - towards a new educational model in dance and choreography - at fabrik Potsdam. The accompanying reader of this conference was published in 2007 at b_books, Berlin ("Reverse Engineering Education", edited by Ulrike Melzwig, Mårten Spångberg and Nina Thielicke).
Since 2006 Ulrike Melzwig works for Tanzplan Potsdam / Artists-in-Residence at fabrik Potsdam, since 2008 as artistic director.
Valérie Castan studied for two years as a dancer at the CNDC in Angers between 1986 and 1888. Her work as an artist performer is established through different live and physical performance experiences with various choreographers. In 2005 she performed the play "Un Après-Midi" (An Afternoon), and Antonia's Baehr play, in Paris. In 2006 she co-performed a duo called "Merci" with a Berliner Artist. In 2008 she worked as a assistant choreographer and coach for the solo Laugh of Antonia Baehr. In 2012 she participated as an assistant dramaturgue in "My Dog is My Piano" and continued in 2013 with a new solo of Antonia Baehr " Abecedarium Bestiarium". Since 2012 Valérie Castan also gives audio descriptions of choreographies for public with visual deficiencies.
Performance Evening: "Portrait of an Eye" with Werner Hirsch and Emily Rysdon at the finissage of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz's exhibition http://kunsthallezurich.ch/en/pauline-boudry-renate-lorenz Werner Hirsch proudly presents: DANCING FOR - a short solo dance created especially for the occasion. Dance - Werner Hirsch DJ - Pauline Boudry "You look ridiculous if you dance You look ridiculous if you don't dance So you might as well dance." - Gertrude Stein
William Wheeler's artistic praxis ranges from performance and film to drawing and installation, from poetry and prose to editorial activities and translation.
Embracing trans-disciplinarity and collaboration as key aspects of his life and work, Wheeler has produced films together with Stefan Pente in which he appears before and behind the camera as animator, actor, and screenplay writer, as director and cameraman. In collaborative performances created together with Antonia Baehr, with whom he has worked since they met during their studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he has been both performer/dancer and director/choreographer.
The alternation of work-roles and the exploration of varying media has produced a diverse body of work which centers, among other topics, on questions of participation with regard to cultural identity, gender, and personal history: What degree of self-interrogation does the gaze of the artist presuppose? Can the personal and the public be neatly binarized, and what lies in the in-between? How can an artist, in her work, promote processes of interlocution which attempt a realtion between, and equally rigorous questioning of, both the political and the aesthetic in art?
Wheeler is currently producing a series of artworks, exhibitions, and performances in collaboration with Stefan Pente under the title ‘Breezeways of Forgery.'