WEEK 2: STILL WATER BITES / SNDO Graduation Festival 2026

About Xiao Chuyue

Xiao Chuyue is an Amsterdam-based performer and dance maker originally from Hubei, China. Currently a choreography student at SNDO, her artistic path first took root in Shanghai, where she joined the performance ensemble ao_ao_ing (老妖精). During this formative period, she developed an interdisciplinary practice that merges performance with her freelance background in graphic design and video editing. Her work moves across the terrains of image, fiction, and medium, focused on the blurry boundaries between the virtual and the physical, the domestic and the public. Recently, her practice has turned inward, drawing on cross-cultural frameworks to question the formation of perception and inherited narratives. By interweaving ancient Chinese legend Chang’e with the contemporary narrative of lunar exploration, she attempts to construct a personal cosmology that bridges distant times, spaces, and cultural landscapes.

About Rafael Gabryelle Reinata Ferreira

Rafael Gabryelle Reinata Ferreira is an artist originally from Portugal, born and raised in Brussels and living and studying at the moment in Amsterdam. She has been developing a work based on absurdity, humor and not taking things seriously, because she feels that the arts field is sometimes too serious. She works with a lot of objects, costumes and people (sometimes alone though) with the idea of creating an organized chaos, made of fails with the purpose of creating a piece that is falling apart by itself or never really starting nor ending that makes the audience wonder what was planned or what was an accident. 

About REYER

REYER (all pronounce) is an artist and club facilitator working across performance, nightlife-events and lived experience. They support their practices through sex-work, recovery and club communities. They prefer to measure their trajectory, not through institutions or degrees, but find interests in staying porous and attentive while engaging with audience. If you’re curious, you’ll find them in the (w)holes where art and life refuses to separate, or you can sent a request to view a living archive of documentation under a nice cup of tea.  

About A.E.Z. Pinay 

A.E.Z Pinay (he/they), is a queer afropean artist, a film maker and a performer. A part of his work and research revolves around the black ethos in France and the Afrodiasporic experience in its poetic, political and spiritual expression. Mourning, melancholy and absurdity are elements that inhabit his creations. He practices grief as a transformative technology and also cultivates his ability to co-exist with the non-human, by learning from forest and ecologies that ground him underneath and beyond marketing values. This translates as activities such as resting, doing nothing, lying down in the grass, pray, mourn, cry, observe the living and to open oneself to the possibilities of different worldings. He currently studies and works in Amsterdam.

About SNDO

The SNDO, School for New Dance Development, offers a full-time four-year professional education course leading to a Bachelor's degree in Art/Choreography. The school was founded in 1975 as an attempt to find new directions for dance next to the existing forms and styles that dominated the field. After forty years, the SNDO remains inquisitive, open minded, and in the foreground of progressive developments in the fields of dance and performance. In the curriculum, the school establishes the conditions from which the creativity of the student can emerge. Reflection on the specific qualities of dance and performance as art forms is developed, and awareness of the body and the artistic, social and political implications of working with it take precedence.