Living, Rehearsing… | Event 1: ‘Soundings’

12pm to 6pm, 17 January
Free admission
Entry is flexible throughout the afternoon, and you’re welcome to stay until 6pm.

‘Soundings’ invites visitors into as a space of sharing uncertainty, attentiveness, and experiments.

The event foregrounds agency in performance, drawing on theatrical gestures and experiments distilled from everyday life. It probes a void, testing its depth, tracing its contours, and sensing what might emerge before any firm direction is chosen.

Through voice, movement, instruments and objects, artists appear as both individuals and a shifting, interdependent group. Instead of following a fixed script, their actions evolve with the environment according to their own language and sensibilities. Audiences are encouraged to wander through the halls, rooms, and interstices of YDP as active participants.

A cellist at the entrance. A melting sculpture in the conservatory. Stand-up comedy cutting through the scene. Movements advancing and receding. In the courtyard, something else begins to take shape…

‘Soundings’ features Kelvin Atmadibrata, Liang-Jung Chen in collaboration with Kai Chareunsy, Hanako Hayakawa, Okkyung Lee , Jin Hao Li and Swilipino.
About Living, Rehearsing...

An evolving, genre-bending performance programme taking place throughout the building. Living, Rehearsing… is conceived as a collaborative framework to test the possibilities of what YDP can be home to and how we might collectively reflect on the concept of rehearsal as a strategy for organising, reconfiguring and reimagining our lives as we venture into the unknown each day. Over the course of three months, the programme will invite an ensemble of artists from the fields of visual art, performance art, stand-up comedy, dance and sound to convene across four day-to-night events, where improvisation meets choreography. Each participant will offer an interpretation on the concept of ‘rehearsal’ and what it may mean to them, drawing on experiences of migration, contingency, navigating thresholds and channelling collective energies. The gatherings will also test a range of prompts and constraints set to explore different ways for audiences to explore the spaces around each performance, from simultaneous actions across multiple rooms, to moving through the building and experiencing collective resonances.

After the performances, elements of their gestures, sound and images will be remixed into installations and spatial interventions that will remain on view in YDP’s space until 21 March.

About the Artists

Kelvin Atmadibrata (b. 1988, Jakarta)
Atmadibrata recruits superpowers awakened by second puberty and adolescent fantasy. Equipped by shōnen characters, kōhai hierarchy and macho ero-kawaii, he often personifies power and strength into partially canon and fan fiction antiheroes to contest the masculine meta and erotica. He works primarily with performances, often accompanied by and translated into drawings, mixed-media collages and installations. Approached as bricolages and remixes, Atmadibrata translates narratives and recreates personifications based on RPGs (role-playing video games) theories, pop mythologies and fanboy psychology. Motivated by the craft of contemporary tattoos, he experiments with the process of image markings on skin as a continuation of his attraction to living sculptures, breathing mannequins and bodies as pedestals.
Kai Chareunsy (b. 1998, Liverpool)
Chareunsy is a Lao-British drummer, composer, and music facilitator who works across a variety of genres, including jazz, free improvisation, electronic, and folk music. He composes with field recordings, traditional folk instruments, and sensory percussion to create music that blurs the line between composition and improvisation. Kai’s recent works include commissions from Brighter Sound, Lancaster Jazz Festival, and B:Music.

Liang-Jung Chen (b. Taipei)
Chen is a London-based artist working across mediums. Rooted in an embodied approach to material culture, Chen builds nuanced situations from the artefacts and infrastructures that quietly underpin everyday life. Through site-responsive installation and live performance, often incorporating gestures and movements, she stages systems of subtle tension that expand materiality beyond the familiar.

Hanako Hayakawa (b. 1995, Nagano)
Hayakawa (b. 1995, Nagano) is a dancer and artist based in Berlin. Drawing on her experience as a dancer and an interpreter, her artistic practice focuses on the concept of the ‘mediatic body’ – the body that sees and the body that is seen. Through this lens, she brings to light perspectives and relational dynamics within social power structures. Her major works include “Lurker”, presented at TOKAS, Tokyo (2021), DESINGEL Antwerp (2024) and Sophiensaele, Berlin (2025). As a dancer, she has collaborated with international artists including Tino Sehgal, Leiko Ikemura, Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe, Miet Warlop, Emmilou Rößling, Simon Van Schuylenbergh, Kazumichi Komatsu and Tetsuya Umeda.
Okkyung Lee (b. 1975, Daejeon)
Lee is a is a cellist, composer and improviser who moves freely between of artistic disciples and contingencies. Lee takes inspirations from noise, improvisation, jazz, Western classical and her homeland’s traditional and popular music, using them to forge a highly distinctive approach. She has also been creating various types of compositions and site-specific works, producing an immersive experience that also challenges the built-in hierarchy in traditional concert settings. Lee has been commissioned to compose music and assemble projects for numerous festivals including the most recent work ‘Signals’, which premieres at Transit Festival (Leuven, The Netherlands), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (Huddersfield, UK) and the Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg. Lee is currently a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.
Jin Hao Li (b. 1998, Jilin)
Li (made in Jilin in 1998, marinated in Singapore, and now cooking in London) is a comedian and writer. Loved for his dry wit, gritty softness and surreal energy, he finds magic in the mundane, often through the lens of nostalgia and childlike wonder. His debut solo show ‘Swimming in a Submarine’ had a sell-out run at Edinburgh Fringe 2024, earning him a nomination for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, followed by a three-week run at the Soho Theatre and a further extension at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Swilipino
Begun in 2018, Swilipino is a creative identity and food project by Tintin Jonsson, a photographer-turned-chef seeking a new creative outlet and a deeper connection to her dual heritage. Through her Swedish-Filipino lens, Jonsson cooks Filipino-inspired dishes that reflect both personal memory and cultural exploration. Drawing from the rich, multicultural foodways of Mindanao, where her mother is from, Jonsson blends traditional Filipino flavours with touches of Swedish nostalgia, creating what she playfully refers to as frankenfood, food that sits joyfully between worlds.
Header image:
Liang-Jung Chen, ebb is to flow as wax is to wane, 2023. Image courtesy of Liang-Jung Chen.

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