CUTTY SHELLS / Katharina Simons will be visiting the Produktionszentrum from 15.08. - 24.08.2025 for a 10-day residency as part of for exchange+.

Nuremberg-based performance artist and director Katharina Simons is working under her label CUTTY SHELLS with performers Elina Brams Ritzau and Julian Sturz on the first scenic sketches for SEX WITH ALIENS - Rethinking Intimacy. 

SEX WITH ALIENS is an artistic research institute that deals with the question of how intimacy can be rethought and experienced. What if what attracts you is not human?

“Eroticism begins where you stop knowing what touches you?”*

The alien becomes a metaphor for the radically different and thus opens up an erotic field of research into strange intimacies and different desires in speculative interstices. At the center is the longing for a togetherness that goes deeper than familiar routines. Tabooed forms and practices are peeled from the cloak of shame and examined for their individual potential for pleasure. Pleasure becomes the starting point and basis for a new kind of relationship and togetherness.

Inspired by science fiction novels and their speculative thinking, the project focuses on an expanded network of relationships. Bodies meet in resonance with other species, technologies, materials, environments and transform themselves into an erotic ecology. How can we experience an ecosomatic vitality in which pleasure is inextricably interwoven with the conditions of our living environments? What political power springs from this sensibility?

During the residency, the research team will work on performative experimental arrangements between delicate intimacy, strange choreography and playful openness. A place where desire and research can meet. A place that rethinks intimacy.

*Quote from an AI in response to the question “What is eroticism for you?”


Concept, direction, choreography: Katharina Simons (she/her)
Performance: Elina Brams Ritzau (they/them), Julian Sturz (he/they)
Dramaturgy: Friederike Heine
Space design: Nastja Antonenko

The research process is to be opened up to interested parties: 

SHOWING
Sunday, 24.08.2025, 4 pm
at Produktionszentrum Tanz + Performance e.

Afterwards, there will be chance to engage in a moderated dialogue with the artists.

for exchange+ (or 4exchange+) / Netzwerk Tanz Süd is an association of the independent dance scenes in the cities of Munich, Nuremberg, Mannheim, Freiburg, Stuttgart and Bamberg. Since 2022, they have been working together to improve the working conditions of independent dance professionals, to create structural conditions for sustainable artistic exchange and to strengthen the position of contemporary dance in southern Germany.

This project is made possible by the Bayerischen Landesverband für zeitgenössischen Tanz (BLZT) with funding from the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts. Supported by the Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.