It is with pleasure we present ‘state of becoming’ as the culmination of eight weeks of collective creating, exploring, and community building. We began with the fundamental belief that art making and art sharing is transformational to the givers and the receivers, the makers and the takers, the performers and the audience.
As you experience the ‘state of becoming’ take a pause and recognize that we are not giving you a story in linear form. There are moments that beg you to deeply feel it all, or in opposition, release and take a breath of fresh air. There are interactions that give away something that we don’t actually have, that seek to know emptiness. This emptiness sometimes is heavy like baggage, like wood, like earth, or sand, or clay. We simply surrender to it. Other times the state of becoming is a witness to our brokenness and seeks to mend our broken pieces. We ask, can we be willing to open ourselves and see it as beauty, even if it is not pretty? If we can, perhaps we may feel light, unbearably light. It is hard to remember how light. We might even realize later, we forgot what we put ourselves through in order to become who we are. Shall we let it out? Shall we keep it in?
This process, and ultimately this performance, is not a quest to identify what we become when we perform. The performers are performing themselves, there are no characters here. Instead, we are asking the question, “what does it mean to be willing to change, and in the moment of transformation, are we willing to open up to those possibilities and vulnerabilities in order to face the unknown? It is a question of how, not what.
We hope you can find something you can hold on to, something to let go of, something to think about later. Maybe tonight, or next week, or five years from now. state of becoming.
In August 2023, the first Performance Co/lab took place at 421 Art Campus. Facilitated by Carlos Páez González and Mary Chase, with a focus on specific values of inclusivity, openness in participation, care, and growth, this was a workshop that ran with the primary intention to bring performing artists in and around Abu Dhabi together into one space, where we could share our collective knowledge and build collaboration. We take an interdisciplinary approach to performance, blending approaches from dance, theater, music, movement practice, writing, sound, and visual art. Since then, Performance Co/lab has continued to be a recurring part of 421 Art Campus’ programing,
Performance Co//ective was born out of a desire for consistency. While Performance Co/labs are individual workshops that allow anyone to join at any point, Performance Co//ective is a selective program that aims to develop original work that is unique to the cohort of artists. By engaging in these longer processes, we create a stronger foundation for collaboration and hope to set the scene for more developed performance work to emerge from Abu Dhabi in the coming years.
Mary Chase and her company C H A S E D A N C E create and produce site-specific, multi-media collaborations captivating audiences in twenty-two US states and internationally in Europe, Asia, North and South America and now in the Middle East. Since 2000, over sixty-five works have been produced around the world.
Every place Chase lives and works, she strives to create opportunities to grow toward cultural inclusion as a compassionate global citizen and artist. Bridging art-making with contemplative practice is paramount to Chase’s artistic vision and ethos.
In Abu Dhabi, Mary enjoys co-leading the Performance Co/Lab and Performance Co//ective at 421 Arts Campus with Carlos Páez González. You may have seen her performing in Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennial for Bik Van der Pol, in the film MUJO by Purring Tiger/NYUAD at Manarat al Saadiyat, or in Corbeaux on Fahid Island for MANAR Abu Dhabi She produced the Abu Dhabi premiere of The People’s Project, a community-based monument of collective healing at the Cultural Foundation that propelled the formation of Abu Dhabi’s first ever movement based artist collective, City of Movement.
Chase believes that leadership and artistic direction succeeds when braiding tradition with innovation. Since 2001, she has worked as an educator and an arts administrator across public, private and nonprofit institutions. She served as the Executive Director of Joy of Motion Dance Center of Washington, DC and directed the dance programs at the College of Southern Maryland, McCallum Fine Arts Academy in Austin, TX and Merrill International School in Denver, Colorado. She has held faculty positions at Eastern University, Coppin State University, Kansas State University, the University of Texas at Austin, Austin Peay State University, University of Tampa, and for the American Ballet Theatre Summer Intensive (Austin). In Abu Dhabi she is the director of Emirates School of Dance providing dance education to students throughout Abu Dhabi in ten locations with a faculty of eight amazing artist educators.
Chase believes that leadership and artistic direction succeeds when braiding tradition with innovation. Since 2001, she has worked as an educator and an arts administrator across public, private and nonprofit institutions. Here in Abu Dhabi she is the director of Emirates School of Dance providing dance education to students throughout Abu Dhabi in ten locations with a faculty of eight amazing artist educators.
Chase is a Jingui Golden Shield Qi Gong student, a Certified Laban Movement analyst and practitioner, a master performing arts teacher holding an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin.
Carlos is a multidisciplinary theater artist, game designer, and educator. His work focuses on creating new realities where audience-participants explore new ways of being themselves and interacting with other humans and non-humans.
After a serendipitous acting workshop 13 years ago, Carlos has been consistently performing, starting in Venezuela with the Theater Group of the Corporate University Sigo, and then in Abu Dhabi with Community Theater groups such as Resuscitation Theatre, Beyond the Veil, and musical performance groups like the UAE National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) and the acapella group Blue Fever. Throughout his undergraduate studies, Carlos developed an interdisciplinary practice that combined theatrical performance with game design. The fruits of this exploration can be seen in works such as After the Mountain Wildfires (The Everywhere Classroom), presented at Dubai World Expo 2020 and produced by Alserkal Avenue, which took inspiration from theories of instructional design to create a live performance combining videogames, board games, choreography, and live narration, where audiences interacted through game-like structures. In recent years, Carlos continues to be active in the Abu Dhabi performing arts scene, performing with groups like the Abu Dhabi Choral Group in their production of Sister Act, and the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, where he performed and coordinated for Bik Van Der Pol’s The Poem that Jumps the Fence and Load Na Dito’s In Search of a Monument.
Carlos is also an experienced theater technician, working in lights and sound. He was the general technician and show caller for La Lezione di Teatro / The Acting Class in the NYUAD Black Box and at The Junction and the lighting designer for Hamour Doesn’t Leave the Cubicle. Carlos is currently the full time technician at the theater in Raha International School Gardens Campus, which boasts a professional grade theater and many shows throughout the year.
Carlos is also a creative coder, having developed an interactive video piece titled Slow Motion, which was presented as part of The Trace of Dawn, an online exhibition by Header/Footer Gallery. Carlos also incorporates creative coding into his performance, such as in the short performance Salata, presented at Alserkal Avenue and produced by Engage 101, where a live simulation would run in parallel to the live performance.
As an educator, Carlos has conducted several arts workshops in Abu Dhabi and Al Ruwais City for different age groups. Carlos, alongside Mary Chase, currently co-runs the Performance Co/Lab and Performance Co//ective programs at 421 Arts Campus, which focus on community building and knowledge sharing. Carlos is currently employed at Al Raha International School, where he teaches theatrical lighting and sound, devised theater, and coding.
Carlos holds a BA (Hons.) in Theater from NYU Abu Dhabi, with a minor in Game Design from NYU Tisch. He is also an alumnus of The Arts Center at NYUAD's Numoo program (first cohort) and of the Sheikha Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (SEAF, 10th cohort).
Asareh Ebrahimpour is a multidisciplinary artist from Iran, based in Dubai. Her work moves between sculpture, drawing, installation, and performance, often exploring themes like identity, mythology, the cycles of life and death, and the body as a vessel of memory and emotion.
Currently, she explores with natural materials like clay and hair and draws inspiration from psychology, nature, and personal rituals.
She’s the creator of Draw Motions, a workshop series focused on expressive art and movement therapy, held across the Middle East in collaboration with researchers and movement specialists.
Her recent projects, like Death is Alive, explore resistance, transformation, and the quiet power of presence.
She sees art as a space for healing, connection, and storytelling through material and motion.
Gabriella Francesca Ciambrone is a Boston born theatre maker who recently moved to Abu Dhabi. Gabriella studied acting and contemporary theatre at E15 Acting School with the University of Essex. Here she graduated with the Stella Wilkie Award winning show SN1 WILTS with her company Black Throne Productions. Her play Girls' Apocalypse will be part of the Thomas Clark Theatre Company (TC SQUARED) New Play Festival 2025 at the Foundry in Cambridge, MA and she is currently in pre-production for her short film, Born A Clown which will be shot in Barcelona in 2026. She is so excited to be part of the 421 Performance Co//ective and can't think of a better place to begin her Abu Dhabi artistic journey.
A UAE based Bharatanatyam dancer, practicing and teaching for over a decade. Rashika is trained under Late Guru Padma Bhushan Saroja Vaidyanathan and Smt. Rama Vaidyanathan. She is an Indian Council for Cultural Relations empaneled artist. She is part of the NUMOO 2024 Cohort, an artist development initiative of The Arts Center at NYUAD. She is also teaching under the Per-Form initiative of the Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi.
With a deep focus and strong rigor in her Bharatanatyam practice, Rashika explores this medium’s agility in various contexts beyond its traditional mythological sources. She is a B.A. in English Literature and M.A, in Arts and Aesthetics and journalism and is pursuing her PHD from European Graduate School.
Rashika collaborated for the Hekayah Festival with Shilpa Ananth, curated by The Arts Center at NYUAD, has performed for The Embassy of India and India Social Cultural Centre, Abu Dhabi. She has been conferred the titles Kala Shree (India) and NatyaSarvabhouma (Singapore). She has had the opportunity to work in documentation process of the Indian Dance Scene in UAE (HIBA Art Project). She started her dance company called Kala Sammridhi, which is involved in teaching Indian Classical Dance and promoting Indian Arts through workshops and performances. Recently, she curated ‘Yugal’, Shivoham 2024 where she strung together pieces referring to duality, celebrating divine female and male and is working on a new production with her students.
Mohammad Othman is a pharmacist with a passion for theatre. He has participated in numerous plays and workshops, Whether on stage or in collaborative projects, he thrives on creative expression and bringing stories to life through performance.
Carmen was born and raised in Sicily, Italy. She graduated as an actress from Piccolo Teatro School in Milano, directed by Giorgio Strehler, previously studying at the Accademia Nazionale Silvio d’Amico, Roma. She attended advanced courses by Nikolaj Karpov, Tadashi Suzuki, Donato Castellaneta; Carolyn Carlson, Lindsay Kemp, Ariella Vidlach, Michela Lucenti, Paola Maffioletti and had a graduation certificate in music theory and piano. Carmen has been acting for all her life throughout Italy, in private, public, children’s theatre productions, by European and Italian classic authors notably Luigi Pirandello and Carlo Goldoni, and by contemporary Italian dramatists. She starred and produced theatre monologues inspired from modern literature and has been acting in the major italian Theater’s festivals, Spoleto, Venice, Taormina, Santarcangelo, played roles in independent films and in a TV series’s episode of the wide acclaimed “Il commissario Montalbano”, performed also for the IIC in Buenos Aires and Abu Dhabi. She has been developing a rigorous interplay between body expression and acting, focusing on her linguistic roots, her broad education, and a philological attitude to express the bridge with word’s writers. She delivered Theater’s courses, until one of the first theater’s teaching program for maximum-security prison. Holding a degree in Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature, she is author of a monologue on her complex heritage. L’Odore della seta. Nature inspires her free-production lyrics, ‘Visioni” via her website. In Abu Dhabi, Carmen enjoys the nuances of the multicultural environment rediscovering the Arab roots of Sicilian heritage. For all this, she joyfully lives the precious opportunity of the 421 Performance Co//ective.
Rawad is a writer and poet who loves to collaborate with artists across disciplines, having worked on several co-created performance pieces that blend contemporary dance, choreography, theater, and storytelling. He writes creative non-fiction and prose poetry. He is one of the co-hosts of the Abu Dhabi Writers Cafe and has been seen on stages of Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, NYUAD Hekayah | The Story, Bayt Al Mamzar and 421 Arts Campus and is currently part of the second cohort of Performance Co//ective. You can find him on social media and Medium @rawad-raidan.
Jomel Duran Reyes is a performance-maker based in Abu Dhabi and the co-founder of 63Kolektib, an all-Filipino theatre and performance group that offers a vital platform for Filipino artists in the region. The collective seeks to foster a sense of community and showcase the rich talent of Filipino creatives, providing a space for their voices to resonate within the UAE's diverse cultural tapestry. Jomel's passion for the arts and his commitment to telling authentic stories led him to become a part of the first batch of the Numoo Cohort in 2021, an arts program run by The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi. Through this program, he has further refined his craft while continuing to explore and celebrate Filipino migrant life, identity, heritage, and belonging in his performances. As a producer and performance-maker, Jomel’s work is deeply rooted in the realities of migrant workers, weaving together powerful narratives that reflect their daily struggles, triumphs, and aspirations. His devised performances are characterized by dynamic and imaginative storytelling that speaks to the heart of Filipino migrant experiences, making them both relatable and current to the audiences they serve. Through his art, Jomel Duran Reyes continues to illuminate the experiences of Filipino migrants, creating performances that are not only a celebration of culture but also a poignant reminder of the resilience and strength of those who live between worlds.
Stephanie Tadros is a multidisciplinary performing artist, director, and educator with a double major in Performing Arts and Marketing and additional filmmaking studies from the Lebanese American University (LAU). A musical theatre triple threat, she moves seamlessly between singing, acting, and dance, bringing storytelling to life through movement, voice, and film. Trained in classical and contemporary singing by esteemed mentors Lara Jokhadar, Maestro Salvatore Scinaldi, and conductor Yasmina Sabbah, Stephanie has performed as a soloist and musical theatre performer on some of Lebanon’s most prestigious stages. A recent standout performance saw her embody Jasmine in Aladdin at Casino du Liban, a collaboration with Cats Production and the USJ choir. Her dance background is equally rich, spanning contemporary, modern, hip-hop, and jazz. She has collaborated with celebrated artists such as Dr. Matthew Henley and Dr. Nadra Assaf at the International Dance Day Festival (IDDFL) and Bassam Abou Diab at Beirut Physical Lab, where she crafted one of her first choreographic works. Beyond the stage, Stephanie’s artistry extends behind the camera as a filmmaker and director, crafting evocative short films that blend cinematic and theatrical aesthetics. Her creative voice is deeply rooted in visual storytelling, weaving narratives that are both striking and intimate. With a natural ability to connect with young artists, Stephanie is also a passionate educator, guiding the next generation through theatre, dance, and music.
Yulia Verigina is an accomplished visual artist hailing from Russia, now calling the UAE home for over a decade.
Though her professional journey initially led her through the corridors of international economics and the oil industry in her homeland, fate had other plans. Following her family's relocation abroad to support her husband's career, Yulia seized the opportunity to pursue her lifelong passion: art.
With an insatiable thirst for creative exploration, Yulia has delved into a myriad of artistic mediums, from the delicate strokes of drawing and painting to the evocative lens of photography and the emotive world of drama and filmmaking.
Yulia currently works as an Art Director in the realms of film and commercial production.
In addition to her professional work, she is an active member of the Russian drama group, Theatre Melpomene.
