Program
shy*play Doing Neurodiversity | Aion Arribas and Antje Nestel | Flam Festival
Aion Arribas | Antje Nestel
On Saturday November 2 artists Aion Arribas and Antje Nestel will be at Veem with shy*play, a three-hour participatory performance that invites participants to explore neurodivergent tendencies through embodied and physical techniques.
shy*play’s Doing Neurodiversity is a three hour long participatory performance. Through embodied and physical techniques of relation, participants will explore together-in-difference the potential for valuing otherwise when departing from neurodivergent tendencies. What if there is no center of attention or space? How to practice a decentered visibility? How can we create an architecture that challenges the view that the human subject is at the center of experience?
Throughout the duration of the workshop, a 300-meter-long fabric composed of various textures and opacities will be used as a space shifter and facilitator. It will also host activities such as costuming, body wrapping, thresholding, voicing, transferring text, and drawing on surfaces, as well as other techniques.
shy*play especially invites bodyminds with a close affinity for embodied experiences of shyness, introversion and/or neurodivergence, as well as its many intersections, to participate in a workshop dedicated to experiments in neurodivergent sociality. All shy*play’s events are procedural: a collective construction of spacetime with those visiting (both human and more-than-human) whereby it is assumed that each mode of existing, seeing, voicing, experiencing, participating, expressing, and moving in the environment has the same existential value, all the while recognizing the effects of cumulative trauma load that neurotypical demands can have on a neurodivergent bodymind.
About Aion and Antje
Aion Arribas (they/them) is a neurodivergent movement artist, transdisciplinary researcher and teacher. They obtained a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design from Escuela Numero 10 in Madrid, a second bachelor’s degree in Choreography from SNDO in Amsterdam, and a master’s degree in Fine Arts and Design from KABK in The Hague. Their work dances in between questions of embodiment and bodying, the interplay of creation with auto-theory, and the advancement of a neurodiversity paradigm through creative practices. Aion’s work often delves into the intersection of sexuality and neurodiversity accompanied by a neuroqueering approach.
Along with antje nestel, they co-created shy*play, a platform focused on doing neurodiversity as a relational practice in difference. This approach challenges the logic of normality and neurotypicality, striving to create ever-shifting forms of sociality. shy*play is also a project hosted by the Research Lectorate of the Academy of Theater and Dance in Amsterdam (DAS Research) and a THIRD fellow 2024-2026 of the same department. Aion was awarded the Academy of Theater and Dance Teacher-Researcher Fellowship 2023-2024 for their project “Neurodiversity as Relation in Arts Education” in collaboration with antje nestel and their platform shy*play
antje nestel (they/them) is an artist, a teacher, a neurodivergent bodymind, a companion to their cat, and a facilitator of participatory events, which they sometimes refer to as art or learning as the accommodation of difference. They obtained a bachelor’s degree in fine art from Gerrit Rietveld Academy and a research master’s degree in Media, Art and Performance at Urecht University. Antje was also a participant at De ateliers in Amsterdam.
Together with aion arribas, they have created a platform that invents with neurodiversity. This platform, currently named shy*play, focuses on exploring with neurodiversity not as a process of explanation, but as a relational practice in difference. Through shy*play, antje is interested in resisting the pathology paradigm that characterizes neurodiverse bodyminds as disordered. They are rethinkingdoing with neurodiversity to create different neurodiverse ways of living in mutual inclusion. shy*play is also a project hosted by the Research Lectorate of the Academy of Theater and Dance in Amsterdam (DAS Research) and a THIRD fellow 2024-2026 of the same department. antje was awarded the Academy of Theater and Dance Teacher-Researcher Fellowship 2023-2024 for their project “Neurodiversity as Relation in Arts Education” in collaboration with Aion Arribasl and their platform shy*play.