Ziza and Januário embarked on a two-week residency at Fabric, Nottingham, centred on cultural exchange, collaboration, and embodied research.
This residency offers a dedicated space for both artists to engage deeply with each other’s practices, framed through the lens of their respective cultural heritages and the environments they inhabit and navigate.
The residency will serve as a platform for mutual exploration, an opportunity to examine how individual and collective memory, resilience, and identity are expressed through movement, performance, and the politics of the body. Together, they will unpack the nuances of cultural storytelling and self-representation, asking:
- How do we voice our histories through the body?
- How do we carry the invisible weight of legacy into our work?
Dandyism By Ziza Patrick. Image By Francis Christeller
powerful visual memories
While rooted in shared inquiry, the collaboration will also focus on the ongoing development of Ziza’s dance theatre work Dandyism, a project initially researched in 2017 and first publicly performed in 2018. Fully commissioned by Arts Council England in 2019, Dandyism draws inspiration from Ziza’s memories of growing up in Kigali, Rwanda, particularly the image of Congolese men dressed in vibrant, flamboyant fashion. These powerful visual memories opened a path to researching the colonial legacy embedded in style, where clothing once imposed on enslaved people was reclaimed and transformed into acts of elegance, resistance, and cultural pride.
In this context, Dandyism becomes not only an aesthetic investigation but a political and spiritual reclamation. Dandyism will serve as an anchor for our collaboration, offering a foundation while leaving space for expansion, experimentation, and mutual enrichment. Through this collaboration, Ricardo will bring in his evolving research, Desarranjo Corporal (“bodily disruption”), which explores the transversality of movement languages and the dismantling of normative physical structures. His practice interrogates how movement can exist in tension, disruption, and transformation, offering a vital lens through which to reframe narratives of power, history, and resistance.
The beauty and tension of resilience
Both artists share a commitment to creating work that foregrounds resilience, resilience born out of communities that often must rely on themselves or each other to make meaning, assert presence, and claim space.
The residency will be driven by this shared thematic core: the beauty and tension of resilience, and how it manifests in bodily histories, memory, dress, and cultural expression. Throughout the residency, Ziza and Ricardo will engage in studio-based research, critical dialogue, and collaborative experiments, working across movement, theatre, and performance. Their aim is to create space for visibility, dialogue, and connection—exploring not only what brings them together as artists, but also how their distinct lineages and inquiries can enrich each other’s practices.
Ricardo Januario Performance Image
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about ziza patrick
Ziza is a UK-based Rwandan artist working across dance, theatre and performance. His practice blends imagination with critical inquiry, drawing on Western esoteric concepts to reframe dominant narratives. Rooted in both African heritage and Western experience, his work channels raw, unrefined energy and expressive dynamism, creating a nuanced intersection of cultures. Ziza’s projects explore universal themes within societal, religious, and political structures. Through diverse creative media, he seeks to engage audiences in both conventional and unconventional settings, promoting visibility, accessibility, and dialogue. His art invites reflection, cultural connection, and subtle transformation.
Ziza holds a BA in Dance from the University of Sunderland and an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art. Ziza continues to engage with dance, theatre, and performance as a choreographer and educator, working across higher education and community settings. He is an active performer, both in his own work and in collaboration with other artists. His work has been presented and performed in national and international contexts.
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about ricardo januário
Ricardo Januário is an arts educator, movement coach, choreographer, and performer. Since 2006, he has been involved in dance practices and research, with an emphasis on the transversality of movement languages.
He is developing the original research “Desarranjo Corporal” and, as a performer, received the Denilto Gomes Dance Award (2016) for the piece Antônia… by Morena Nascimento. Januário has collaborated with artists such as Shamel Pitts, Christine Devaney, and Naufus Ramírez Figueroa, performing in Brazil and Europe. Between 2023 and 2025, he taught at São Paulo School of Dance and currently creates original works and collaborates on projects like Amor Catastrófico by Luciane Ramos Silva and ColetivA Ocupação.
Residency Exchange
Fabric supports artist-to-artist cultural exchanges both in England and abroad.