Current Artists:
Dispatches
At Shebang, we invite local artists to take some time to delve into their current creative research; they share what they discover at the end of their respective research period.
This is Dispatches.
Check out our previous Dispatches artists below!
Lu donovan
Lu Donovan is a choreographer, performer, and teaching artist based in Philadelphia. His work prioritizes pleasure and researches strategies of queer-ing. He plays with other queer and trans artists to build widening worlds that create containers in which bodies can pump up, relax down, or find the sweetest way their hips move to a beat. As an amateur anatomist and physicist, his dance practice utilizes these “sciences” to open the possibilities of existing in a gendered body, offering more and more options for how to move about this world.
Lu creates work alongside Micah Lockman-Fine, designer, curator, and installation artist. The two have shown their work together over the past 2 years through Dream Sweet, Rough Man and Rough Man’s Playground. Lu has also shown original pieces at the Icebox Project Space, Fringe Arts, Headlong, and Vox Populi, as well as self-produced in fields, basements, and apartments across Philadelphia. His work tends toward facilitation with a curiosity not only about how it feels to witness performance, but also to explore movement within oneself. Lu has taught at the University City Arts League, the Woodlands, Mascher Space Cooperative, and through the Philly Dance Share.
jungeun Kim
Jungeun Kim (J.e.) is a choreographer, dance and movement-based performance artist, educator and digital media artis. Her research and practice embraces and integrates many disciplines, nurturing relationships between individuals as well as the social connections within communities while expanding ways of communication. What sparks her curiosity is how one’s lived experiences manifest in the body and body movements. Her research and creative process is motivated by accessibility: that art, whether it be dance, theater, music and beyond, is for everyone. She is interested in work that is approachable in many different ways for and with others as spectator, participant or collaborator. She works with both mediums of dance and digital media, such as video, moving images and animation to create live performance, participatory events, experimental video and animation works. Her process begins with interdisciplinary approaches by choreographing and mapping assorted images; crafting different pieces and movement sequences together like doing a puzzle without knowing the final image; improvising with various elements and materials such as sound/music, video projections and tangible objects to transform and design the performing space; embracing differences to create a collective story; facilitating events that invite people to build connections.
Her dance and video work has been presented around the U.S., Europe and Asia including Korean Cultural Center, Design Philadelphia, Taubman Museum of Art and Torino Esposizioni. As an educator, she has taught extensively, from a community center for refugees and immigrants, to dance festivals, to institutions of higher education.
She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from American Dance Festival/Hollins University, under direction of Donna Faye Burchfield and Master of Arts in Liberal Studies in Visual and Performing Arts from Hollins University. She is currently pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Restorative Practices at the International Institute for Restorative Practices Graduate School. Jungeun hails from Seoul, South Korea.
kaijo caggins
kaijo caggins (they/he) is a Black trans performance artist, educator and doula. they observe improvisation and defiance through pleasure in their performance practices. kaijo works with the body, sounding and disorientation; with an emphasis on queerness, somatics, and liberation as life force. they facilitate queer Contact Improvisation jams + teach CI based classes. living within Lenapehoking and Nacotchtank, he is currently in community with local CI enthusiasts, multidisciplinary artists, families, and the rivers. kaijo is pursuing their MA in Women’s, Gender + Sexuality Studies at The George Washington University.
Marisa Illingworth
Marisa (she/ they) is a movement and performance artist based in Philadelphia, land of the Lenape people. She is most interested in authentic movement, radical and expansive movement practices, and movement as a means of grounding toward collective liberation/revolution. In her work, she has been exploring themes of grief, rebirth, togetherness and queerness through performance. Marisa performed a solo dance theater show in the 2024 Cannonball festival called authentic grief baby monologue. They earned their BFA from the University of the Arts in 2016, and have worked with many incredible artists in the area since.
