Artistic leadership, Production, Organisation
Anna Possarnig
Anna was born in Klagenfurt, Austria. She holds a Bachelor degree in Dance and Dance Pedagogy from Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität. Since 2011 she has been actively engaged with national and international projects working with such companies and choreographers as Neoba Dance company, Bakarti Dance Company, Liz King/ D.ID Cie, Tanzcoop and many others. She is actively teaching Contemporary Dance and Ballet and is a licensed GYROKINESIS® Method trainer and Nuad Thai practitioner. Her recent occupations include Tanzquartier Wien, Beat1060, Totem Dance Kiev and Sozo Kassel. Anna is founding member of Pop-Up Collective (PUC) and Movement Lazuz.
Maria Shurkhal
Maria was born and raised in Kiev, Ukraine. She started her professional education at the Serge Lifar Kiev Municipal Ukrainian Academy of Dance and continued at the Anton Bruckner University, Linz. Now she lives and works in Austria as a freelance dancer, choreographer and pedagog, collaborating with such artists and institutions as Rose Breuss, Cie Off. Verticality, PUC collective, the National Austrian team of Rhythmic Gymnastics, Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst FHNW, MDW among others.
Amir Ahmadi
Amir A. Ahmadi was born in 1988 in Iran. He studied Engineering at the university of Ahvaz and meanwhile Amir also studied piano, music theory and composition. After the graduation he followed his desire to study music and moved to Austria. At the moment he studies composition under the supervision of professor Carola Bauckholt at the Anton Bruckner University Linz. Next to the studies he also works as a pianist and organises contemporary, jazz and classical music events in Austria and Iran. In 2015 he founded an ensemble Studio Fugu that works in a field of Contemporary arts.
On Stage
Eszter Petrany
Eszter Petrány is a Hungarian contemporary dancer, who was born in Szentendre, Hungary in 1991. She started dancing at a young age with ballet, jazz and Hungarian folk dance bases in a school where music and dance were integrated in the everyday education. She continued her dance training later in Budapest where she completed a theatrical dancer faculty. From 2012 she was studying contemporary dance and movement studies (dance pedagogy) at Anton Bruckner University in Linz, Austria and completed her Bachelor studies there in 2016. Over those years Eszter was working with choreographers such as Rose Breuss, Harmen Tromp, Regina van Berkel or Eldad Ben Sasson. Eszter continued her studies as a master student of dance pedagogy from 2016 on and started to work as a freelancer dancer partly with ongoing projects of Rose Breuss, as a company member of Cie Off Verticality Dance and as a guest dancer of Landestheater Linz. During the years of master studies her main interest was musicality and verbality through dance, which she included in her pieces as well as through her teaching practices. As a next level, Eszter started to research about poetic qualities in art which can be transported as valuable tools for contemporary dancers. She is a big fan of fusion, multimediality and abstraction on stage, she often combines dance with singing or speaking. She has strong passion for creative writing, the last years her texts and manifestos were presented and published on different platforms. Besides dancing, performing and writing, Eszter collaborates with different artists for specific projects, such as ’The Shore of Unspoken’ (Local Artist Award winner at YOUKI Festival, 2018) which was a narrated short film including motion capture technology, or as Christian Heigner’s photography album of collodion photos (2016-2017). Eszter Petrány joined PUC in 2018 and she is currently living and working in Austria as a freelancer dancer.
Jerca Roznik Novak
Jerca Rožnik Novak, born in 1992 in Ljubljana in Slovenia. She finished Art high school for contemporary dance in Ljubljana in 2011. 2016 she graduated at Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz in Austria. With 2017 she is continuing at the same university with the master studies in pedagogy. Before coming to Linz in the year 2011 she was a part of the project “The Daddy Project“ at Plesni Teater Ljubljana. The same project won Ksenija Hribar award for promising dancers in 2013. She created a piece “Hweōl… in the whirlwind of time” together with Leon Marič in 2016.
She collaborated with choreographers such as Willi Dorner, Rose Breuss, Gisela Elisa Heredia Anna Gulyás, Maria Koliopoulou, Matjaz Farič, Johannes Wieland and was a part of the production L’Italiana in Algeri for Tirol Festspiele Erl. She is a part of the piece BLUE INK by Enya Belak, premiered at Plesni Teater Ljubljana in September 2018. She is collaborating with editta braun company since 2014 and is a part of a recent piece called Trails. She is working with SILK Fluegge since 2014. Recently she is creating with Johannes Randolf and is dancing in a duet “2gather/al(l)one”. The solo version of the piece won an Award for promising piece and the best performance at Festival Ukrep: ENTER in Slovenia. She is a part of PUC Collective and is a part of the “Bauhaus tanzt II”.
Off Stage
Stefanie Schiefermair
born 1990 in Linz (AT) is another member of PUC. After some years in Graz, studying Art History and Culture Anthoropology, she returned to her hometown to continue her studies at Kunstuni Linz, where she is studying currently Media Culture and Art Theory.
While she was focused many years onto architectural and historical aspects at her studies, she got lately more and more interested into contemporary art and media arts. That`s why she started to work for several festivals in the last years, like transmediale Berlin, tanzhafen festival Linz, Urbanize Vienna and International Short Film Festival Linz, as part of the organisation and communication teams. Beside that, she tries to develop also some of her own artistic research projects, where she is questioning different aspects of society and gender as a method and way to understand her own background. At PUC she works behind the stage and is responsible for PR, communication and organization.
