Meet Our Artist | PACT Lab: Process, Play, Experiment 2025
PACT Lab: Process, Play, Experiment (PPE) is PACT’s unique multi-arts incubator for emerging artists. It is a full-time, two-week lab intensive that supports eight emerging artists in building their skills, experimenting with form and evolving their craft to its next stage.
Introducing our 2025 PPE artists:
Dechen Gendun
I’m a street dance artist specialising in breakdance, hip hop, house, and freestyle movement. My practice blends raw physicality with rhythm, musicality, and creative storytelling, drawing on the energy of street culture while exploring new ways to express movement.
Dechun’s Project
This work delves into the shifting landscape of self-identity and the ways societal expectations shape us. Through freestyle movement, I explore the messiness of identity—how it unravels, transforms over time. At its heart, the piece is about peeling back the layers we’ve collected through conditioning. It examines the pressures to conform to certain roles and how, through movement and presence, we can begin to decondition ourselves. The work embodies the emotional complexity of identity—its struggles, moments of resistance, and evolution over time. It highlights the tension between who we’re told to be and who we truly are, capturing the ongoing external and internal battles we face as we grow and transform.
Jesse Vivante
Jesse Vivante is a percussionist, sound designer, maker, and performer, originally from Boorloo (Perth) and now based in Naarm (Melbourne). Their practice explores the intersection of contemporary percussion, choreography, installation, and dance, investigating how percussionists’ choreographic gestures can exist externally from their sonic function and be explored within alternate environments. Their sonic-choreographic language is rooted in site-specific stimuli such as temperature, topography, and found objects, and is driven by the emotive response found across this bespoke interdisciplinary exchange.
Jesse’s Project
The project I wish to explore through the PPE: Lab focuses on the movement-based dimension of my sonic-choreographic practice, building on work developed earlier this year during a residency at Castello di Burio in Costigliole d’Asti, Italy.
I’m drawn to emotional states of fragility, innocence, and infancy. Qualities that have appeared in my sonic work as delicate textures or gestures. I now wish to bring them forward physically, using the body as both a site of performance and an emotive landscape. This work will serve as a study and personal offering: a performative journey of self-acceptance and embodied vulnerability.
The process of understanding our bodies, shapes, textures, and perceived flaws is nonlinear, deeply personal, and universal. I aim to create space for these complexities to surface and resonate with others. Through a physical language that explores internal tension and tenderness, I will integrate movement with sound built from live body percussion and extended by a textural soundscape. Ultimately, this project seeks to generate a space of resonance between sound, body, and audience. One grounded in empathy, intimacy, and emotional truth. It is an invitation to witness the expressive capacity of the body, and the shared human experience embedded within it.
Lady Chika
Angelica “Lady Chika” Osuji is a dynamic dancer and choreographer whose work blends Afrofusion, Afro-Brazilian, and contemporary movement. Drawing from her Nigerian-Brazilian heritage, she brings vibrant storytelling, rhythm, and cultural expression to every performance. Her high-energy style inspires connection, celebrates tradition, and invites audiences into the heartbeat of the African diaspora.
Lady Chika’s Project
My project explores the intersection of Afro-Brazilian traditions, contemporary dance, and storytelling through movement. Drawing from my Nigerian-Brazilian heritage and professional experience as a dancer and choreographer, I blend Afrofusion, Afro-Brazilian forms such as Capoeira, and contemporary techniques to create performances that honour cultural history while reimagining it for the present. The work examines how rhythm, ritual, and embodied memory shape identity, connection, and resilience across diasporas.
Through physical exploration, I investigate the layers of the body as a vessel for history, the flesh as the physical memory, the soul as the emotional archive, and the spirit as the force that drives transformation. My process embraces improvisation, research, and collaboration, allowing the work to evolve organically while staying rooted in cultural authenticity.
The project will unfold through studio experiments, movement scores, and live improvisations, leading to a performance that invites audiences into an immersive sensory experience. This is both a celebration of cultural heritage and a dialogue about migration, adaptation, and belonging.
Lige Qiao
Lige is a Gadigal-based artist (and curator, sometimes) who constantly contemplates suburban landscapes. Their practice revolves around the locational lived experience in Northern China and the influence of digital culture. Working with language and translation, they seek to explore the intricate connection between temporality and presence through video-based synchronisation.
Lige’s Project
iwv fén is a video and performance-based work that delves into my matrilineal heritage, reanimating folk rituals of my hometown, I aim to reimagine the conception of home and domesticity. This work uses site-specific folk music as a vessel to bridge the distance between my hometown and my positionality. Integrating folk music is a way of reclaiming marginalised cultural practices and peripheral traditions. I try to ‘build a home’ in iwv fén by using found materials; inspired by the ideas of staging, I construct the ‘home’ with myself as the actor inside. As a non-trained Chinese drum performer improvising entirely with a prop helmet, I rely on the sound from the video as the only indicator of time and environment. Thinking of community events during festivals and ceremonies, I perceive sound to be inherently immersive and performance as naturally ritualistic.
Mây
Mây is a Bidjigal-based, Vietnamese theatre-maker, lapsed Catholic witch, and Evil Autistic. Their past projects as an actor, writer, and director, reflect their passion for the liberation, radicalisation, and celebration of marginalised, queer, and disabled stories and storytellers, they’ve performed at the Sydney Opera House, Carriageworks, The Old Fitz Theatre. Their work seeks to archive the shared Autistic culture that’s risen outside the symptoms in the DSM-5, and explores Performing, the performance of Goodness, the cultural construction of Evil, and what it would feel like to murder Elon Musk.
Mây’s Project
On a spectrum from allistic to autistic, May is Autistic. On a spectrum from good to evil, May is Evil. May is one of those trendy, late-diagnosed, they/them Autistics. May is trying to make it in show biz. That's expensive. May has taken a sponsorship from, and provided non-zero DNA samples to, a shady AI start-up for financial compensation.
Evil Autism is a multimodal, multiversal, performance work that asks, are you good or just well-behaved? And what would happen if you ripped the fabric of the universe trying to kill Elon Musk and absorb his Autism? Evil Autism explores the construction and utilisation of Autistic masking, the performance of Goodness, and what we deem Evil, through the lens of performance, pop culture, and psychosis. It is loosely based on the work and findings of Sue Grand in The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective.
Oliver Durbidge
Oliver Durbidge is a theatre maker and puppeteer working on Gadigal Land. As the co-founder and co-creative director of Highly Strung, an Inner West—based puppetry performance group, Oliver creates dynamic, immersive works that blend puppetry, movement, and ensemble storytelling.
Oliver’s Project
Pip pip pip pip. There are 86,400 seconds in a day and each one is precisely pipped off, day in, day out, by the MSF service of broadcast standard frequency and time. 86,400 pips per day. 31,536,00 pips per year. How many pips do you have left? How many are you willing to spare?
‘Pip’s Demonstration From the Department Of Time Deceleration’ explores the relationship between entertainment and time through puppetry and clown theatre. As the audiences time is traded for entertainment, they are left to ponder the question: When time is money, how much is my entertainment worth?
“With just a small donation of a handful of pips, you can help the Department’s goal of the deceleration of time and a slower tomorrow.” - Pip The Clown (Official representative and lead Time Trader from the DOTD - Department Of Time Deceleration)
Prince
My practice engages with empires’ impositions of race, borders, and colonialism in Southwest Asia, rooted in my Lebanese-Assyrian lineage and Queer-Trans experience. I center live performance alongside film, painting, movement, and social practices to explore shifting senses of self, connection, and how bodies are governed through walking, stillness, and somatics. My work investigates how art can resist and restore connection to body, memory, place, and belonging, drawing from radical pedagogy, Assyrian cosmology, ancient magic, storytelling, archives, and dreams.
prince’s Project
My project uses trickster characters and disruption to carve out new storytelling spaces, investigating gaps in my heritage’s fragmented stories and offering opportunities to fabulate and reconnect with ancestors. The performances channel ancient energies, resurrecting and re-enchanting looted cultural icons into dynamic, embodied protectors shaped by queer and diasporic experience.
TESH
TESH is a clown doing a strange horny dance between cosmic mythology and whatever they found funny on the internet today. TESH has performed heaps of times. They’re really good at it. They have moderately sized jugs and they’re not afraid to use them.
TESH’s Project
MATERIAL FOR STARTING A FIRE is a live performance experiment in clowning, queer body politics, and urban myth-making.
At its centre is PUNKIE — a genderfuck clown, a virtuous pervert — a creature that exists somewhere between the past and the future, decay and rebirth. An ancient shapeshifter reimagined as a club icon, a digital trickster navigating grief. She’s lost her body and her mind — but together with the audience, we rebuild her.
The work is rooted in queer performance histories, erotic rebellion, and humour as survival tech. How do we make sense of the irreparable? What queer rituals can guide us through collapse?
MATERIAL FOR STARTING A FIRE is a love letter to queer futurism — a world where bodies decompose and transform, sex is harnessed as defiant resistance and myths are spun through the glitchy lens of late-night cabaret.
