We are thrilled to announce the participants in the third cycle of Open Rehearsal: Artun Alaska Arasli, Rebecca Lillich//Krüger, and Yin Yin Wong. The participants were selected by curator Mini Maxwell and the If I Can’t Dance artistic team.

Open Rehearsal is an initiative of If I Can’t Dance to support the development of performance practices across the diverse communities of artists based in Amsterdam and the Netherlands, aiming to create much-needed space for intimate dialogue on ideas and works-in-process. The programme welcomes artists from various practices such as, and not limited to, architecture, dance, music, theatre, and visual arts.

Taking the familiar form of the open rehearsal as a starting point, Open Rehearsal unfolds across online and on-site spaces, offering the participants opportunities for feedback from audiences, community peers and specialized practitioners. From mid-June you are invited to follow the projects-in-development in our online studio and in late June and July the Open Rehearsal presentations will take place in our space at the WG terrain.

Welcome at the Open Rehearsal studio spaces of Miyoung Chang and Dakota Guo, Benjamin Francis and Clara Saito, participants in the second cycle of the ongoing initiative at If I Can’t Dance to support the development of performance practices across the diverse communities of artists based in the Netherlands, and with the aim of creating much-needed space for intimate dialogue on ideas- and works-in-process. From May you are invited to follow the projects-in-development in the studio, and on 17 June the Open Rehearsal on site presentations will take place at Pre-Reserved in Amsterdam.

The project Theater of Drag: Action, Healing and Telenovela by Clara Saito, consists of working with different queer activist collectives in the city of Amsterdam. The project is inspired by the techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal, as well as the book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics by José Esteban Munoz, but also by drag and telenovela. Throughout the creation period, one collective will work with the artist to develop their own unique characters and storylines, drawing on their personal experiences and struggles. The project is a collaborative effort to use theater and performance as a means of exploring and addressing issues related to queer activism and social justice.

Within the framework of Open Rehearsal Benjamin Francis will be presenting the work: Control It – Delete It. He will be working with new methods of pedagogy in the form of an anatomical theater lesson, where participants will be asked to lay on an autopsy table, as they are being cleansed by performers, who will be analyzing and processing their (dirty) artwork subject. The participant turns from an active subject to a silent object, being cleansed for their own good.

In the duo project Chu Renmei and Hye-Joo two daredevil friends, Miyoung Chang and Dakota Guo, come together in an attempt to study and exhaust the conventions of East Asian horror filmmaking. Claiming that they are not afraid of western ghosts in the arrogance of their displacement from the geographical sites where “effective” haunting would be possible, the duo delves into the mechanisms of the cinematic apparatus through which an abstracted horror affect of the absent presence of ghosts is nevertheless generated.

Welcome at the Open Rehearsal studio spaces of Billy Mullaney, Jae Pil Eun and Mariana Jurado Rico, participants in the inaugural cycle of the ongoing initiative at If I Can’t Dance to support the development of performance practices across the diverse communities of artists based in the Netherlands, and with the aim of creating much-needed space for intimate dialogue on ideas- and works-in-process.

Jae Pil Eun (b.1991, Wonju) is a writer and performance artist exploring modes of translating personal and intergenerational memories through mythologies, rituals and Korean traditional music. Studying and interpreting practices deemed “primitive” in Western society, Jae’s practice treats performance as an affective site that can challenge dominant worldviews. His Open Rehearsal: Butterfly Dreams weaves historical research into Peking Opera, the figure of Mei Lanfang together with his personal lived experience. The project experiments with auto-fictional narratives and durational strategies of representation.



Billy Mullaney (b.1988, Minneapolis) is an artist working in theater, choreography and performance art. His work probes the representational practices associated with various sites of performance, as well as the modes of spectatorship they conventionally engender, and how interventions into the former affect the latter. His Open Rehearsal: Gloria Ex Machina: A Glory Machine Director's Cut with Commentary Track builds on the theatricality of the contemporary demand to curate, perform and document idealized versions of ourselves and the repercussions it posits on both the form and content of performative practices.



Mariana Jurado Rico (b.1991, Bogotá) is an artist and curator working with printing, publishing, radio, and (video) performance to facilitate points of convergence between people; mobilizing humor, failure, impatience and contradiction as mediums of resistance. Her Open Rehearsal: Failed Manifest(o) proposes a performative politics of failure that responds to the inherent tension between the societal and super-egoic pressure to be successful and the ruthless order that condemns one to fail.

Open Rehearsal is supported by AFK #openrehearsal