bottom up productions, founded by Julek Kreutzer and Felipe Fizkal, de-hierarchises contemporary dance production. For Sophiensæle’s Tanztage Berlin, Isabela Fernandes Santana (as choreographer) and Mariagiulia Serantoni (as a dancer) collaborated with BUP to create O Que Resta do Fogo (14–15 January 2026).
Through the lens of embodiment as knowledge in bottom up’s commission for Tanztage, authorship moves in multiple directions. Dancers invite another to author, inviting themselves to interpret, exposing how agency, responsibility, and imagination circulate across bodies and roles: the dynamics of intent and desire in dance-making. Decision-making, labour, and meaning are distributed across a collective process.
In O Que Resta do Fogo, inspired by charcoal burning, dancing bodies move through rigorous imaginative practices that transform solids, liquids, and gases. Tension fractures, craze builds, the atmosphere releases and spreads. The landscape opens into a blowing, changing tribute space shaped by pressure, heat, and duration.
The following conversation among Alice Heyward, Felipe Fizkal, Julek Kreutzer, and Isabela Fernandes Santana reflects on the conditions, ethics, and practices that shape the work.
A: This is your second premiere as bottom up, troubling conventions of freelance contemporary performance production. How did this project begin?
F: Our motivation is caring and sharing. We are all overworked as freelancers. In Latin America, creative processes often happen collectively across roles; responsibilities are shared in precarious conditions. Julek and I asked: how can we offer time and space to a choreographer to evolve their practice? Usually, we need to be chosen as dancers, a privilege that often depends on access, visibility, nationality, gender, and class.
J: We realised we have many skills and resources to pull together. How can production be thought horizontally? I can deal with German administration; another might know someone who can lead a warm-up, and another has access to a studio. These capacities can be shared rather than all expected to be managed by the project’s initiating author.
A: Even when a choreographer receives independent support, carrying all the multi-roled labour alone is exhausting. The one-name branding of productions isn’t good for anyone.
J: Even when there’s one name on a piece, we develop it together. We’re not saying dancers lack agency; this isn’t a critique of that. It’s about recognising the potential of being a group and making these dynamics visible.
F: We curate each other from an intersectional perspective. Our projects are supported by a network of people. With all layers of production shared and visible, our behaviour changes. We have to notice our own habits so we don’t reproduce vertical structures.
A: Sounds like empathy. In conventional structures, choreographers rehearse all day, then spend hours on emails and budgets, and are expected to return creatively fresh.
F: How can dancers be more proactive in breaking the idea that choreographers must provide everything? If I’m interested in someone’s practice, I can help create conditions for it. That’s a different model of coworking, based on shared responsibility.
A: Despite only two weeks of collective studio time, the rigour of the practices in O Que Resta do Fogo was palpable.
I: I’ve mainly worked as a dancer since arriving in Europe, but I’m also interested in developing my choreography. It was a joy to join bottom up and share my practice.
I spent one week alone writing a text, dreaming the piece. It contains five scenes, images, and landscapes to enrich our practice. I describe a scenic space where charcoal burners perform their work in a clearing in the middle of a forest, shifting between rest and routine, and undergo a metamorphosis through organic, mechanical, tactile, and careful gestures.
These workers are ambivalent figures. They embody the mysteries, legends, and ancestral knowledge of the forest and their craft, but also an enormous power to destroy that same forest.
I shared this text with everyone, and we spent the following weeks working together with the dancers, and trusted collaborators I invited: the musician (Michelangelo Contini), light designer (Eduardo Abdala), and costume advisor (Suelem Cristina). The text became material to be embodied, a journey through densities rather than a narrative. The festival dramaturg (Polina Fenko) also joined our collective studio time.
We ran the work, at whatever stage, every day. We had to trust the process.
F: Charcoal labour practices take many hours or days. Our creative process felt connected and present, rediscovered collectively each day.
A: Smoke felt potent, conceptually extending to many kinds of material entering, leaving, moving between us—healing and destructive, carrying memory and time.
I: The dancers engage with the invisible and the visible, creating space for the audience to imagine. Embodiment relates to what matters materially and politically. I understand matter not only as a physical substance but also as energy, flow, and vibration. I am equally concerned with matters that matter to us: questions, memories, affects, and gestures that gain significance throughout the creative process.
J: We’re rethinking tired terms like process, premiere, and production, and how they can be redefined. Performing is spiritual for me: a body-to-body communication beyond words, a continuous learning.
F: We’re still experimenting, learning how to carry people into the future, finding things out through doing.
