Belle Santos & Emi Ogura – Sophiensæle | Freies Theater in Berlin

Belle Santos is a Berlin-based artist working across installation, performance, text and costume design. Her work has been shown at the Kyoto Art Center, transmediale studio, Pogo Bar x KW Institute for Contemporary Art and the Athens Biennale. She was a resident at the Saison Foundation, Tokyo, Goethe Institut Villa Kamogawa, Kyoto and Cité International des Arts, Paris. Her current work explores themes of girlhood, hysteria, trauma, mourning and expressions of grief. 

Emi Ogura is a performance maker and festival director based in Kyoto, Japan, working across the performing arts, music, dance and Burlesque. She studied opera singing, dance, drama and theater at the music school of OGAKI Gifu prefecture, from 2006 until 2010. After that she started her career in contemporary dance and joined her first projects. In her artistic practice she creates works centered around universal human themes, such as love, jealousy, life, sex, and death. Since 2022 she has been organizing the festival KYOTO Cultural Festival that rethinks the characteristics of the theater as a meeting-place. She is also the Program Director for Kyoto International Dance Workshop Festival since the 2025 season.