In April/May 2025, Sophiensæle welcomes multidisciplinary performance artist Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald her team as part of the dance residency program NEW TECHNIQUES. During the residency, she explores anticolonial resistance and Black rage as embodied techniques of protection, strength, and collective joy.

Drawing from histories of the African diaspora, she weaves her own lineage into globally shared narratives of Black resistance. Together with Naledi Majola and Sointu Pere, she examines these stories and dances as choreographies of memory, imagination, and solidarity.

Colleen Ndemeh Fitzgerald is a multidisciplinary performance artist, activist, and cultural worker of Kpelle (Liberian) and Irish-American descent. Her movement-based practice is rooted in Afro-diasporic, West African, and contemporary dance techniques, centering her feminist, antiracist, and anticolonial politics. She received her BA in Dance and Anthropology from Bates College (USA) and her MA with distinction in Performance at the University of the Arts Berlin – HZT (Germany). She has performed and taught in the Americas, West Africa, and Europe. From 2014 to 2019, she lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she was artistically and politically active with Afro-diasporic communities.
There, she co-founded Kukily, an Afro-feminist arts collective working across borders in performance, audiovisual media, installation, and community-centered projects. In 2024, Kukily was invited to the Lagos Biennial.

colleenndemeh.com

With our dance residency program NEW TECHNIQUES, we support early-career artists based in Berlin and simultaneously reflect on the concept of technique in the contemporary dance scene.
We have named our residency NEW TECHNIQUES because we want to explore the notion of technique together with emerging dance artists—a term that, in recent decades, has been replaced by “practice” in dance discourse, education, and criticism. We ask what technique might mean in today’s pluralized dance world. This exploration is not only about how existing dance techniques taught in schools and studios (from ballet, modern, contemporary dance, or urban styles) relate to cultural identity, power dynamics, historical contexts, or social practices, but also about how other forms of embodied knowledge and self-technologies passed down in our communities and societies influence the field of dance and the artistic practices of the invited choreographers.

The NEW TECHNIQUES residency program is part of the "Residency Support for Berlin Dance Artists," through which the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion first introduced and awarded residency programs in 2020.