Artists in Residence Announcement
- Date
- 11 Mar 2025
The Live Art Development Agency welcomes Samra Mayanja, Claudia Palazzo and Symoné as Artists in Residence between April and December 2025.
As part of the residency, the three artists will be supported by LADA to develop peer-to-peer artist networks in relation to their own research. They will explore ideas and methodologies in dialogue with other creatives, and the Study Room resources. Over the 9 months, LADA will also support the Artists in Residence with their ongoing professional practice.
LADA has a long history of championing professional development by artists for artists, and we have also consistently heard the call for more community and network building for practitioners working within the multiplicities of live practice.
The invitation to the Artists in Residence was sparked by each artist’s different desires to explore new models of collaboration and our own desire to create more ways for artists to connect with LADA, and LADA to connect with artists.
‘LADA is a space I often come to be transported. My intention for the residency is to bring more people into this little pocket of East London and to do some more deep diving into the ways that we document performance.’
– Samra Mayanja
‘I’ve been looking for ways to share practice and build community, less temporary than chats at the bar. I am interested in how we show up for each other, and I enjoy learning about the intricacies of other artists’ practice, especially when they are completely different to my own. I’d like to use LADA as a base to explore community, visibility and self-censorship.’
– Claudia Palazzo
‘Through conversations, research and collaboration with peers working adjacent to me, I’m really looking forward to experimenting with my interdisciplinary practice between gaming, live performance and movement, and exploring the prospects of what a game can be and how it can be experienced/played.’
– Symoné
Samra Mayanja
Samra Mayanja is an artist-writer obsessed with language, humour, and the illegibility of the body. She is interested in the residue from translations between writing, drawing, film, and performance. Her practice is heavily supported by the instability of these translations and how the limits of each medium give life to the next. Samra’s performances blend physical theatre, sexy-gone-sour slapstick, and poetic monologues, often featuring tender vocal improvisations honed through work with experimental ensembles. She has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and theatres, including Cambridge Junction, The Oval, Centre for Live Art in Yorkshire, Somerset House, Tetley (Leeds), MAMA (Rotterdam), Kampnagel (Hamburg), Transmediale (Berlin) and LIVE Biennale (Vancouver). Her solo exhibition The Living and the Stale explored what it means to lose and be lost and took place at The Tetley in 2023. Samra writes weekly about performance, audiences and the loose choreography that is humanity on her Substack P3RFORMANC3 PRINC3SS.
Samra Mayanja, The Call Centre, 2024. Image by an audience member
Claudia Palazzo
Claudia Palazzo is a London-born artist working at the intersections and contradictions of dance, performance art, installation and alternative cabaret. It is often poetic, unmanageable, meditative and violent in its structure. Influenced by roots in nightclub culture, inner-city structures and psychophysical training, allowing space for dissociation and re-association as a way of processing, contextualising and navigating things which may feel enormous. Her work often exists in a place of tension using the interplay between inherent strength and the impact of damage. She seeks to establish charged connections and feedback loops of understanding with an audience in order to process and harness the power and feeling of a temporary community. Claudia is currently looking for things to represent her dancing body in her absence. She is interested in subliminal and feral communication with architecture and an audience and wonders how we can challenge ableist ideals of mobility without succumbing to soft control that is disguised as care.
Claudia has presented her work in a wide variety of contexts ranging from the underground club scene to festivals and spaces including: SPILL Festival (UK), Ventana Sur (Chile), Club Antichrist (UK), Fabric (UK), Skopje Pride (North Macedonia), Ugly Duck (UK), Palazzo Lucarini (Italy), Cyberdog (UK), VFD (UK), BUZZCUT Festival (UK), Duckie (UK) The Flying Dutchman (UK) and others. She is also a member of the drag troupe The LipSinkers, lectures at UEL and has had a 17+ year career as a performer in the work of many artists and companies.
Claudia Palazzo, image by Zbigniew kotkiewicz
Symoné
Symoné (she/they) is a Guinness World Record-holding interdisciplinary circus artist, video game designer, creative director and cabaret and performance artist, with British and American roots. Performing since 2016, she has taken her act to 11 countries, from the United States and Jamaica to India. Symoné has worked with artists and companies such as Instagram, Peaches, Taylor Mac, Guinness World Records, Kurt Geiger and Samsung, and has been featured in publications like Time Out, Instagram Editorial, Gay Times and The Stage. Symoné is also a director of personal theatre productions such as UTOPIAN (t&c’s apply) and Euphorica, having been commissioned by entities such as Cambridge Junction, Trigger Stuff, The Place and Arts Council England, with shows touring across the UK. She holds a BA in Anthropology from SOAS and has been awarded a full scholarship at Code Coven Games Academy. As a game designer, Symoné focuses on rethinking traditional video games formats and mechanics and she’s experimenting with ways to queer the medium and its narratives.
Currently, Symoné is involved in the development of mixed-reality experiences that combine Live Art, live gaming, circus arts and immersive digital elements to explore themes of identity, memory and roleplay. These include the solo audio/visual installation and videogame experience A Dream Within A Dream, and the new mixed-reality theatre production Nullspace Motel, in collaboration with Sammy Metcalfe (Sleepwalk Collective) and the New York based Live Art director Reed Rushes.
Video documentation of the event Alternative Realities: A Discussion about Live Art & Gaming with Symoné, which took place at LADA in November 2024, is available on our website.
Symoné, image courtesy of the artist
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