Michèle Murray

MICHELE MURRAY is a choreographer and artistic director of the PLAY / Michèle Murray Company. A Franco-American national, she trained first in Düsseldorf in classical ballet , then in New York with Merce Cunningham and at Movement Research, later on with many teachers and choreographers in Paris before collaborating on various choreographic projects as a performer, notably with “l’art not least” in Berlin, Didier Théron in Montpellier and Bernardo Montet at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Tours. Since 2008, she has also been working as choreographic assistant with Didier Théron.

From 2000 onwards, she develops her personal work within the Michèle Murray Company, which becomes Murray / Brosch Productions in 2008, in artistic collaboration with Maya Brosch. She has created numerous works which have toured extensively in Europe .

In 2012, wishing to concentrate on projects dedicated primarily to dance and choreography, she founds PLAY / Michèle Murray, of which she is artistic director and choreographer, while researching in close collaboration with artist coworkers. 

She creates the ATLAS / STUDIES, a “choreographic atlas” of ten short pieces for seven dancers, which is presented for the first time as a whole as part of the Festival Montpellier Danse 2018.

In 2020, she choreographs WILDER SHORES, a performance for six dancers with a musical composition by Gerome Nox for the Festival Montpellier Danse 2020.

She presented in 2022 EMPIRE OF FLORA, a choreography for four dancers and a DJ which premiered at the Montpellier Dance Festival.

In 2022, she also created DUOS – COLLISIONS AND COMBUSTIONS / A CHOREOGRAPHIC COLLECTION FOR THE MUSEUM, which premiered at the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst- DKW Museum Cottbus on October 1-2, 2022, as part of the Dance in Residence Brandenburg program, Germany.

In April 2023, she will choreograph a dance piece for the 25 performers of the CCN - Ballet de Lorraine.

Michèle Murray also teaches dance and performance art. Her teaching is closely linked to her choreographic research.

Adam Linder

Adam Linder was born in 1983 in Sydney, Australia.
He is based in Berlin.

Linder’s practice focuses on the specifics of dance and how different forms or genres relate to notions of technology, desire, value and power. At the age of sixteen, Linder was scouted by The Royal Ballet School in London and left Australia to pursue a career as a dancer. Linder’s early training was later consolidated during formative years spent with The Michael Clark Company and Meg Stuart’s Damaged Goods where he began to develop the critical and experimental strands that inform his choreographic work.

In the contemporary dance context, PARADE (2013), Auto Ficto Reflexo (2015), The WANT (2018) and LOYALTY (2021) have received significant critical attention and toured throughout Europe and the United States. 

Across all of Linder’s stage works is a Gesamtkunstwerk approach that synthesizes scenography, costume, light, sound and text.  Linder’s extensive embodiment of multiple forms of dance informs the virtuosic nature of his choreographic handwriting.

In the visual art context, Linder gained recognition with his Choreographic Services (2013-ongoing), a series of performative works that can be hired on an hourly basis. The first service, Some Cleaning (2013), saw Linder enact the gestures of cleaning, choreographing commonplace actions into a series of mimetic movements that took on their own formal significance. The hiring of the Choreographic Services calls into question how choreography can be at work within the exhibition space, what are the material forms of art we consider to be valuable and how to produce an alternative economy for dance outside of both the traditional theatre and visual arts markets. 

FULL SERVICE, a survey of Choreographic Services 1–5, was presented by the CCA Wattis Institute San Francisco in September 2018. It then travelled to Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in February 2019. SHELF LIFE, a perofrmance commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art NY in 2020, saw two iterations in Europe in 2022 at Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal and Le Commun, Geneva, Switzerland as part of the Dance First Think Later Festival. In the Fall of 2022, LOYALTY was on tour at Tanz im August in Berlin, De Singel in Antwerp and at Dampfzentral Bern.

Other recent solo or two-person shows have included South London Gallery (2018); Kunsthalle Basel (2017); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2016); and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2015). His works have additionally been commissioned or presented by institutions such as HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto; Kampnagel, Hamburg; Sadler’s Wells, London; 356 Mission, Los Angeles; and The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Linder has participated in the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016), the Liverpool Biennial (2016) and Made in LA (2016) at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, for which he was awarded the Mohn Prize for artistic excellence. As a result of this prize, a monograph focusing on his stage works Who Is Surfing Who was published.  

Linder is currently preparing a solo show at MCA/ Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, Australia to open in 2023.