Forest Kapo

The Homeless Gods emerges from the ongoing body of work Archives of an Indigenous Body — a triptych by Ngāti Raukawa and Te Āti Awa artist Forest Kapo that returns, again and again, to the question of what an Indigenous body carries and what it refuses to surrender.

This is a quiet work. Low-tech, high-quality, and resolutely analogous, it is built from simple actions and vocal textures rather than spectacle. Movement arises through shadow, ritual, and recovery. Script develops through chance and circumstance — a methodology that trusts the body's intelligence over predetermined form.

Part installation, part prayer, The Homeless Gods is a dialogue with the past conducted in the present tense. It asks what it means for ancestral presences to exist without fixed territory — displaced, persisting, undeniable. Those homeless gods do not disappear. They wait in the body, in the voice, in the space between one action and the next.

A residency work in development.

Forest Vicky Kapo (they/them) is of Te Āti Awa, Ngāti Raukawa descent, hailing from Pōneke/Taranaki and now residing on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Bendigo, Australia.

An alchemist with a renegade spirit, Forest has facilitated, choreographed, and collaborated in performance events and festivals across Germany, USA, India, Norway, Greenland, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. A Unitec graduate with a Masters from Melbourne University (2025), their multidisciplinary practice weaves live and composed sound, text, movement, imagery, and installation to facilitate connection, and to uncover the mythologies embedded in contemporary socio-political life.

Drawing on the cosmic-comics approach of writer Italo Calvino, Forest's work moves between the intimate and the epic, the sacred and the irreverent. When not making art, Forest works as a nurse. It is rewarding and deeply undervalued work.

Want to support Forest’s work? Send them a donation through the button below. 100% of the tip will go to them.

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Jan Smolira

Carnivorous Flowers (working title) is a contemporary dance work which explores the fragile border between tenderness and hostility. The carnivorous flower, a delicate but off-putting plant, blends petals with flesh and, through its slimy consumption of insects, disturbs the cultural connotations of flowers as feminine, delicate, and harmonious. This is the basis for a choreographic exploration of manipulative relationships between women, where the distinction between caring and harmful behaviours is unclear: attention can become danger, and stillness can become violence on a hair trigger. The slightest pressure of the fly results in its death and digestion.

Inspired by the literary work of Elena Ferrante, Carmen Maria Machado and Derek Jarman, Carnivorous Flowers is a development of Smolira's choreographic fascination with the strangeness of the natural world. Though not exploring an exclusively queer subject matter, the work will have a queer lens. Smolira is curious about how the grotesque and the surreal might disrupt restrictive Western notions of femininity, and become metaphors for sensitive and emotionally loaded subject matter.

Yaga Arts is the choreographic project of Janina Smolira. Janina Smolira (They/Them) is a freelance contemporary dance artist from Tāmaki Makaurau, now based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They graduated from the Unitec Contemporary Dance programme in 2022, and by the time of the P.F.O.C.D 2026, will have completed a Master's in Creative Performance Practice at Toi Whakaari. Smolira is interested in crafting intimate works where performers and audience cohabitate to investigate matters of the flesh and heart. Their research interests include gender expression and queer story-telling, contemporary dance dramaturgy, and audience interpretation. Their first full-length solo work, The Shedding of Velvet, debuted at the 2025 P.F.O.C.D. It used creature-like embodiments to defamiliarise the human form, to explore the shame associated with the gendered body. Their second work, Eve, a trio created as part of their Master's research, contrasted archaic Christian ideas of gender with modern bathrooms and rave spaces, to explore the ancient roots of the media moral panic currently unfolding around gender expression. Carnivorous Flowers is the third choreographic work under the Yaga Arts project.

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Presley Ziogas

Presley will be experimenting with physical embodiment through the lens of a queer, femme, Māori identity. Presley wants to investigate the process of making with her body whilst sharing her own perspective as being both Māori and identifying as queer, and how these intersect. The development positions the body as a political site and a personal archive, holding trauma and the possibility of healing.

As part of the residency, she will work alongside Kōwhai Deuchars, and Grayson Ziogas supporting movement-based research and development through a collaborative exchange. This is an investigation into attempting to facilitate more cross engagement into different segments within the dance community.

Presley Ziogas is a takatāpui wahine Māori dance artist based in Aotearoa. Presley has created group works, solo works, short films, and contributed to professional projects/companies since graduating from the Unitec Dance Program in 2018. Drawing on her lived experience as a queer, indigenous woman, she brings a deep and nuanced perspective to her practice. Through her work, she seeks to strengthen her place in the industry while giving voice to stories and communities that are often overlooked.

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Grace Ella Lewis

Part of an ongoing body of research since 2022, including works I Like to Adorn My Human Skin and Holding the Sun, this new choreographic proposal, Pourous, expands into a post-human world. The component being researched at the Pōneke Festival of Contemporary Dance explores how the body is housed and constrained by architecture, and how environmental shifts shape human response. The research opens new possibilities of the Cyborg as forms with extensions to the naturally existing body. Wearable, architectural elements will shift the body’s silhouette, agency, and relationally, drawing it beyond the human form, where movement can emerge through altered physical logics. Working with sculpture, the grotesque, and the unstable agency of the body, the group will begin to build a transfigured, living terrain from which choreography will emerge.

Grace Ella is a dynamic dance artist and choreographer from Aotearoa, New Zealand, who has worked internationally for the past three years. Her Journey into physical practice began with studying Architecture and Music Composition at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, and slowly merged into the dance sphere. Grace Ella explores the transfigured human, enhancing the delicate balance between care and physical overload. Through the process of expanding the bodies capacity, she seeks to cultivate a sense of empathy within the viewer while shaping forms that appear unattainable, extending beyond the natural limits of human form.

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Nadiyah Akbar and Ben Ashby - A2 Company

Come Closer is a way of growing a connection to homeland, wherever that may be - examining and celebrating diasporic artists and the responsibility that holds. Come Closer asks, “What does my culture ask of me at this moment?” A question that may feel familiar but not fully accessible, distant with a yearning to belong. This residency will focus on Nadiyah Akbar’s growing relationship with Bangladesh and Pakistan through dance, and Seth Boy’s relationship with the Philippines through Music. An exploration of how rhythm, sound and movement can heal and bring artists closer to their home.

Nadiyah Akbar and Ben Ashby are partners literally and creatively. a2 Company is their production house, it was founded in Te Whanganui a Tara and they are now based in Naarm. They work with live music, contemporary dance, heightened design and original text in order to bring artists and audiences together to reflect on the state of the world. They believe live performance builds community, and communities create change. Their current works include Freestyle in Shades of Yellow (2023 premiere), Running into the Sun (2024 premiere) and Motion Sickness (2025 premiere). They’ve won a slate of awards across Aotearoa and Australia for these works, including The Excellence in Movement Award at the Wellington Theatre Awards and Best in Theatre at the Melbourne Fringe.

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Hanna Hairil

"Between the Two" investigates the relationship between the moving body and fabric as an extension of physical, emotional, and spatial expression.

Hanna Hairil is a Freelance Contemporary Movement Artist and a recent graduate of the New Zealand School of Dance. Hanna is passionate about movement and is excited to start her choreographic journey as a professional dancer.

Want to support Hanna’s work? Send them a donation through the button below. 100% of the tip will go to them.

Please use ‘Hanna’ as reference.