DIY Nights - IN CASE OF FIRE TAKE THE STAIRS

About the Night:

How does language work? And how does non-language not work? Why spend money? Why leave the house? Why not stay indoors, wrapped in a cozy blanket, and a good book?

IN CASE OF FIRE TAKE THE STAIRS is a new piece by Casper Dillen and Small Sample Size Theatre. It is pitched as an ode to those forms of performance that gamble with the attention, and presence of the viewer. Desperate to give as much as possible in return for time. Visually, the work aims to overload attention: relentless movement, collective choreography, futile tasks taken seriously, and moments of precise athleticism.

About the Artists:

Direction:
Casper Dillen

Music:
Gia Dreyer

Set Design:
Jude Cui

Stylist:
Lulu Yang

Costume design:
Christy Taylor
Jude Cui
Lulu Yang
Satur Chong
Zoe Kwok

Assistant Costume:
Lil Soap

Wearable installation (Seance) created and performed by:
Electric Adam

Performers:
Angelos Kotzias
Annie Finn
Calayah Huang
Casper Dillen
Christy Taylor
Illroy
Jahrhys Greenidge
Dr. Joe Saunders
Lil Soap
Neo Gao
Nye Cooper
Paul Tymoshenko
Satur Chong
Serena Thomas
Shannen McCormack
Shujing Huang

Promotional image photographed by:
Viktoriia Chernykh

Film and photography: Xinyue Tao

Supported by Studio Wayne McGregor through the FreeSpace programme

Angelos Kotzias (b. Athens, Greece) is a London-based artist working primarily in painting, extending his practice into sculptural and spatial forms. His work explores memory, landscape, and the emotional structure of human experience. Rooted in a Mediterranean cultural background and shaped by the urban density of London, his practice navigates the tension between natural horizons and metropolitan confinement. Drawing from literature, personal memory, and lived experience, Kotzias simplifies and reconstructs emotional states through layered painterly and sculptural surfaces angeloskotzias.com

Annie Finn is a queer, London-based movement artist. Trained Irish dancer that hates to keep their arms still. Ex drag-thing. Devisor of performance art pieces, most recent being SLABS (Manchester, Denmark, St Leonard’s On Sea) Graduate of ETA, Rose Bruford. Lover of a boogie.

Calayah is a London-based digital performance artist and curator whose practice explores how the fragility and unpredictability of the human body can intervene in the rationalized structures of digital space. Drawing on performance art’s core elements—presence, contingency, and improvisation—she uses motion capture, VR, and glitch aesthetics to disrupt the seamless order of technology and expose its fractures.

Casper Dillen twists performance, sculpture, and philosophy into public toilets, and karaokebooths. Graduate of CSM (Dean’s Award), Birkbeck (Philosophy), and RCA. Venues include: Fitzwilliam Museum, Camden Art Centre, The Place, CPR (New York), WIELS (Brussels), Wasteland (Zhongshan), Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre (Taipei), and Cannes Film Festival. Shortlisted for New Contemporaries 2024.

Christy Taylor is an artist working across every medium, currently focused on iPad drawings and music. Past lives include: mental health support worker, Deliveroo rider, painter and decorator, scam call centre employee, librarian and Wetherspoons barman. He holds an MA from the RCA, has shown work at Tate and Camden Art Centre, and is represented by Between People

Corey Lyu is a London-based multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, performance, AI-generated art, and moving image. Their work explores gender, Chinese folk culture, queer identity, and cultural memory. Performing as Lil Soap, they blend sound, body, and storytelling, and play percussion in experimental collective LaoSanYang. They are also the UK’s only active male Peking Opera dan performer.

Electric Adam is a London based artist, their practice combines sculpture, wearable art and installation for live performance. Their work explores themes around fetish, sexuality and the body, influenced by religious imagery, ancient sculpture and a pop culture sci-fi aesthetic. electricadam.com @electricadam

Gia Dreyer is a queer, non-binary composer from New Jersey. Gia is developing an ethnography concerning the ontology of musicality observed in street vending at Times Square, NYC. Recent debuts of their work and research include the Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency, the Vienna Summer Music Festival, the Atlantic Music Festival, New Music on the Point, and the Nevada State Prison Museum.

Illroy is a London based mixed media artist, Specialising in various crafts from traditional spectacle frame making , designing and breakin. Often their work is heavily inspired by the outdoors and natural spaces within urban landscapes and our place within it. IG: @gypsieboysloth

Jahrhys Greenidge is an award winning actor, dancer, voice-over artist, model and musician who has an insatiable passion for the arts. He's a storyteller at heart, so he has a deep desire to share important stories with honesty, truth and some humour if the occasion presents itself.

Joe Saunders is Associate Professor in Philosophy, Durham University, UK. He works on ethics and agency in Kant and the post-Kantian tradition, as well as on media ethics and the philosophy of love. He also hosts a regular philosophy and film series at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds.

Jude Cui is a London-based multimedia artist who sees everything as potential material. Her work examines the interplay between visuality, motion and stillness, and the real and the fictional, exploring posthuman experience through errors, ruptures, and personal narrative.

Lulu Yang was born in Pengxi, Sichuan Province, and graduated with a BA in Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She currently lives
and works between London and Chengdu. Rooted in design, her practice spans film, theatre, installation, and performance.

Neo is an ethnographic researcher and inter-media artist whose practice encompasses writing, sculpture, sound installation, and moving image. His work is often initiated from autobiographical and poetic writing, through which he re-narrates histories and identity politics embedded in archival objects. Approaching contemporary migration as both lived experience and cultural method, Neo assembles dislocated cultural forms from host and homeland contexts, translating mythic transpositions and individual life narratives into material and sonic configurations.

Nye Cooper is a performer based in London.

Paul Tymoshenko is an artist torn between London and Paris. His practice spans across photography, painting and performance ; he’s been influenced by Arte Povera movement and his life going upside down numerous times . Often what he makes seems totally senseless but that is the sense of it.

Satur Chong is a Malaysian artist based in London. Working across wearable and utilitarian objects alongside embodied performance, she examines the power structures embedded within the female body and the everyday items that surround it. Her practice probes intimacy, agency, and resistance through material and gesture.

Serena Thomas is a Dancer, choreographer and Model based in London. Her work combines a variety of styles to explore themes of femininity and innocence. She draws on her career in the fashion industry to create pieces that are maximalist in both appearance and content.

Shannen McCormack is a Scottish dance artist based in London, working across classical, contemporary and research-led performance. She has performed internationally with Svendborg Ballet Teater, Étoile Ballet Gala, Acosta Danza and Alexander Whitley Dance Company, and is currently part of the Acosta Advanced Training Hub. Her practice centres on narrative, character and physical inquiry, with a strong interest in how dance can evolve alongside an ever-changing society.

Shujing Huang is a UK based artist and PhD candidate at Central Saint Martins. Centering on women’s experiences, her practice weaves personal narratives and bushi (discomfort) through sculpture, video, and performance. Her tense, occasionally violent aesthetic juxtaposes moving bodies with fragile forms to explore identity and bodily autonomy, employing embodied Nüshu as a lens for contemporary East Asian women’s narratives.

Xinyue Tao (b.1998, Kunming, China) is a London-based artist whose practice explores the subjective perception of time and space through self-identity, memory, and the unconscious. Guided by intuition, her work is primarily rooted in photography, while also extending into performance, installation, and experimental forms.

My name is Zoe Kwok, and I am a womenswear student at the London College of Fashion, currently working on my final-year project. My practice is deeply rooted in my experiences growing up in Hong Kong. I explore the unexpected details of everyday life, focusing on juxtaposition and reinterpreting elements of Hong Kong culture from a fresh, contemporary perspective.

Accessibility:

Please note, we are on the second floor of a warehouse building, accessed by a staircase only. We regret that we cannot currently adequately support wheelchair users and those for whom stairs are a barrier.

We are committed to removing other barriers to access. If you would like to talk to us about your access needs, please contact: frances@chisenhaledancespace.co.uk. Read more about our commitments to anti-ableism as part of our Artist Community Culture Document

About DIY Nights:

DIY Nights are CDS’s performance programme created in the spirit of grassroots, low stakes performance making and sharing.

Anyone can apply to run a DIY Night, and CDS programmes them on a rolling basis for artists looking for a way to try out new ideas with low financial risk.

If you are interested in running your own night, you can learn more and apply here.