| GINA HOCH-STALL |
between us and everyone here
COLLABORATORS
AMINA GILBERT (Lighting Collaborator): Amina Gilbert is the lead technician at The Neo-Futurists and a freelance lighting designer at everywhere. Once, two people described her as 'scrappy' in the span of one week and this meant a lot to her. Find her work at aminagilbert.com.
JEFF HANCOCK (Costume Designer) is an Associate Professor of Practice at Northwestern University, collaborative interpreter with Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak, and founder of -ish design, where he explores emergent values, positionality, and ways of being through making costumes, movement, and his practice as a teaching artist. A founding member of River North Chicago, and formerly with Hubbard Street and others, he practices relentless curiosity-as-inspiration about/from nature, humans/animals, materials, joy, queerness, anxiety, his cat, and his husband Joe.
GINA HOCH-STALL (Choreographer) would prefer to start by asking you a few questions: how you got here, what you're looking for, what kind of day you're having. She tends to resist the tidy, achievement-forward biography that lists credentials without revealing much about the person underneath. Still, some context helps.
Described by Thinkingdance.net as "one of Philadelphia's strongest dancers," Gina is a choreographic deviser and movement-based artist whose work has been performed along the East Coast, in Chicago, and across Europe. She spent a decade as the Artistic Director of RealLivePeople, a contemporary dance theater company, and holds an MFA in Dance from The Ohio State University, where she was a Dean's Distinguished Fellow. She has taught contemporary technique, improvisation, contact improvisation, and Mary Overlie's Viewpoints Method throughout the United States and Germany. She is on faculty at Loyola University Chicago, and also works as a dramaturg, facilitator, organizer, and Embodiment Coach.
That version leaves out some things. Gina is earnest, forward-thinking, and, at times, a bit bossy. She likes to plan, though her performances tend to resist that impulse, unfolding through real-time decision making. For her, performance is a conversation between performers, audience, space, and all the unseen baggage everyone brings into the room. Fixed responses, whether in dance or in life, feel hollow. She'd rather try to respond honestly, even if that means getting it wrong sometimes.
RAY MADRIGAL (Mapmaker) is a worrier and maker. Their work is concerned with worldly details, and how elements of the everyday might be studied to the benefit of vibrant survival. As a descendant of immigrant farm laborers, Madrigal strives to take nothing for granted in an increasingly unlikely life. They hold a BFA from SAIC and were named Home Depot Associate of the Month at store #6675 from October 2020 through February 2021. They currently live, work, and play in Chicago, IL.
AMANDA MARAIST (Performer) is a dancemaker and performance community advocate making performance work and arts programming in Chicago. her work synthesizes mutualism, play, world-building, and ethnographic research into practical somatic strategies for thriving.
She simultaneously produces her own artistic performance work while also co-directing bim bom studios; an accessible, sliding scale hourly movement rehearsal + performance space in Belmont Cragin. these two efforts exist in symbiotic tandem: creating performance that is collaborative and accessible - as well as creating physical spaces within the dance ecosystem that fill gaps left by evaporating institutions. her commitment to support the community, and the strategies employed to arrive at something that both survives and thrives, show up in the aesthetics and actions of her performance and the spaces she imagines.
She is most recently supported by a 2024 Links Hall Co-MISSIONS Residency, a 2025 residency at the Ragdale Foundation, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, a 2025 Synapse Arts New Works residency, and a 2027 residency at Moulin Belle in Perigord, France.
bim bom studios is a 2024 recipient of the City of Chicago’s Small Business Improvement Fund grant for capital improvements, and has also received programming support from the Cook County Small Business Bureau’s Source Fund in 2024.
SURINDER MARTIGNETTI (Dramaturg, Videographer, Audience Engagement Advisor) is an Australian-born cultural producer, multidisciplinary artist, and arts strategist based in the Chicago area. She likes shiny things and boxes, gardening, and dancing around the house for no reason. She is good at pencil sharpening, listening, asking questions and making things. She wears a lot of polka dots and doesn’t like bananas.
Surinder holds degrees in Dance, Theatre, Education, and Arts Management from Western Sydney University and Columbia College Chicago. For nearly twenty years she has worked alongside artists and cultural organizations as a producer, fundraiser, facilitator, consultant, and arts leader, with experience spanning museums, festivals, nonprofit
arts organizations, and independent creative practice.
Through Connect the Dots, Surinder supports artists and organizations in building sustainable projects, stronger communities, and more equitable creative ecosystems. Her own artistic work includes dance, writing, photography, storytelling, and jewelry, often exploring migration, identity, memory, and belonging through humor and deeply personal narratives.
CHRISTINA MARTIN (Performer) is an interdisciplinary performance artist and movement educator with roots in contemporary dance forms, contact improvisation, Afro-Caribbean dance, postmodern experimental music, vocal jazz, and physical theater. Chrissy blends contemporary dance and language/voice to rigorously examine her intersecting queer and neurodivergent identities. Martin is an avid member of the global contact improvisation community and has facilitated and taught workshops across the Midwest. She has performed with Sarasota Contemporary Dance, Muscle Memory Dance Theatre, Dead White Zombies, BodyCompass Dance Projects, and Ayako Kato/Art Union Humanscape, and has performed works by Jeanine Durning, Jenna Riegel, and Jawole Jo Willa Zollar. Somatic practices such as Pilates, GYROTONIC® Expansion System, Body Mind Centering® and Laban/Bartenieff Fundamentals inform Chrissy’s integrated movement style. She has taught dance and somatics at Cleveland State University, Columbia College Chicago and DePaul University, and is currently an Assistant Professor in Northwestern University’s theatre department. She has produced independent dance/voice works at Links Hall and Hamlin Park in Chicago, Light Box in Detroit, the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought in Northampton, MA, and been presented at the Allen Theatre in Cleveland, OH, and the Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts in Evanston. chrissymartinmakes.com instagram: @chrissybounce
VERENA PIRCHER (Dramaturg) studied contemporary dance (BA) at Codarts Rotterdam and holds an MA in Movement Research from Anton Bruckner University in Linz. From 2015 to 2019, she was a full-time ensemble member with the Swedish dance company Norrdans, touring internationally in works by Mari Carrasco, Peter Svenzon, Lenka Vagnerová, and Fabio Liberti, among others.
Verena trained as Countertechnique teacher in 2018 and regularly leads Countertechnique workshops internationally, including at Danscentrum Stockholm, Tanzfabrik and Marameo (Berlin), American Dance Festival (Durham), and HJS Amsterdam. She has also led trainings with companies such as Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Norrdans, Tanz Linz, and Volkstheater Rostock, and has worked with students at institutions including Bruckneruni Linz, HfMDK Frankfurt, and Codarts Rotterdam.
In 2021, she co-founded the dance organization Selva with choreographer Rosana Ribeiro. She currently works as a dramaturge and, in 2024, took on the role of artistic director of the Salzburg-based PERFORMdANCE festival. Her research focuses on kinaesthetic empathy and the communicative potential of the moving body in an increasingly digitalized world.
JEFF HANCOCK (Costume Designer) is an Associate Professor of Practice at Northwestern University, collaborative interpreter with Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak, and founder of -ish design, where he explores emergent values, positionality, and ways of being through making costumes, movement, and his practice as a teaching artist. A founding member of River North Chicago, and formerly with Hubbard Street and others, he practices relentless curiosity-as-inspiration about/from nature, humans/animals, materials, joy, queerness, anxiety, his cat, and his husband Joe.
GINA HOCH-STALL (Choreographer) would prefer to start by asking you a few questions: how you got here, what you're looking for, what kind of day you're having. She tends to resist the tidy, achievement-forward biography that lists credentials without revealing much about the person underneath. Still, some context helps.
Described by Thinkingdance.net as "one of Philadelphia's strongest dancers," Gina is a choreographic deviser and movement-based artist whose work has been performed along the East Coast, in Chicago, and across Europe. She spent a decade as the Artistic Director of RealLivePeople, a contemporary dance theater company, and holds an MFA in Dance from The Ohio State University, where she was a Dean's Distinguished Fellow. She has taught contemporary technique, improvisation, contact improvisation, and Mary Overlie's Viewpoints Method throughout the United States and Germany. She is on faculty at Loyola University Chicago, and also works as a dramaturg, facilitator, organizer, and Embodiment Coach.
That version leaves out some things. Gina is earnest, forward-thinking, and, at times, a bit bossy. She likes to plan, though her performances tend to resist that impulse, unfolding through real-time decision making. For her, performance is a conversation between performers, audience, space, and all the unseen baggage everyone brings into the room. Fixed responses, whether in dance or in life, feel hollow. She'd rather try to respond honestly, even if that means getting it wrong sometimes.
RAY MADRIGAL (Mapmaker) is a worrier and maker. Their work is concerned with worldly details, and how elements of the everyday might be studied to the benefit of vibrant survival. As a descendant of immigrant farm laborers, Madrigal strives to take nothing for granted in an increasingly unlikely life. They hold a BFA from SAIC and were named Home Depot Associate of the Month at store #6675 from October 2020 through February 2021. They currently live, work, and play in Chicago, IL.
AMANDA MARAIST (Performer) is a dancemaker and performance community advocate making performance work and arts programming in Chicago. her work synthesizes mutualism, play, world-building, and ethnographic research into practical somatic strategies for thriving.
She simultaneously produces her own artistic performance work while also co-directing bim bom studios; an accessible, sliding scale hourly movement rehearsal + performance space in Belmont Cragin. these two efforts exist in symbiotic tandem: creating performance that is collaborative and accessible - as well as creating physical spaces within the dance ecosystem that fill gaps left by evaporating institutions. her commitment to support the community, and the strategies employed to arrive at something that both survives and thrives, show up in the aesthetics and actions of her performance and the spaces she imagines.
She is most recently supported by a 2024 Links Hall Co-MISSIONS Residency, a 2025 residency at the Ragdale Foundation, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, a 2025 Synapse Arts New Works residency, and a 2027 residency at Moulin Belle in Perigord, France.
bim bom studios is a 2024 recipient of the City of Chicago’s Small Business Improvement Fund grant for capital improvements, and has also received programming support from the Cook County Small Business Bureau’s Source Fund in 2024.
SURINDER MARTIGNETTI (Dramaturg, Videographer, Audience Engagement Advisor) is an Australian-born cultural producer, multidisciplinary artist, and arts strategist based in the Chicago area. She likes shiny things and boxes, gardening, and dancing around the house for no reason. She is good at pencil sharpening, listening, asking questions and making things. She wears a lot of polka dots and doesn’t like bananas.
Surinder holds degrees in Dance, Theatre, Education, and Arts Management from Western Sydney University and Columbia College Chicago. For nearly twenty years she has worked alongside artists and cultural organizations as a producer, fundraiser, facilitator, consultant, and arts leader, with experience spanning museums, festivals, nonprofit
arts organizations, and independent creative practice.
Through Connect the Dots, Surinder supports artists and organizations in building sustainable projects, stronger communities, and more equitable creative ecosystems. Her own artistic work includes dance, writing, photography, storytelling, and jewelry, often exploring migration, identity, memory, and belonging through humor and deeply personal narratives.
CHRISTINA MARTIN (Performer) is an interdisciplinary performance artist and movement educator with roots in contemporary dance forms, contact improvisation, Afro-Caribbean dance, postmodern experimental music, vocal jazz, and physical theater. Chrissy blends contemporary dance and language/voice to rigorously examine her intersecting queer and neurodivergent identities. Martin is an avid member of the global contact improvisation community and has facilitated and taught workshops across the Midwest. She has performed with Sarasota Contemporary Dance, Muscle Memory Dance Theatre, Dead White Zombies, BodyCompass Dance Projects, and Ayako Kato/Art Union Humanscape, and has performed works by Jeanine Durning, Jenna Riegel, and Jawole Jo Willa Zollar. Somatic practices such as Pilates, GYROTONIC® Expansion System, Body Mind Centering® and Laban/Bartenieff Fundamentals inform Chrissy’s integrated movement style. She has taught dance and somatics at Cleveland State University, Columbia College Chicago and DePaul University, and is currently an Assistant Professor in Northwestern University’s theatre department. She has produced independent dance/voice works at Links Hall and Hamlin Park in Chicago, Light Box in Detroit, the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought in Northampton, MA, and been presented at the Allen Theatre in Cleveland, OH, and the Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts in Evanston. chrissymartinmakes.com instagram: @chrissybounce
VERENA PIRCHER (Dramaturg) studied contemporary dance (BA) at Codarts Rotterdam and holds an MA in Movement Research from Anton Bruckner University in Linz. From 2015 to 2019, she was a full-time ensemble member with the Swedish dance company Norrdans, touring internationally in works by Mari Carrasco, Peter Svenzon, Lenka Vagnerová, and Fabio Liberti, among others.
Verena trained as Countertechnique teacher in 2018 and regularly leads Countertechnique workshops internationally, including at Danscentrum Stockholm, Tanzfabrik and Marameo (Berlin), American Dance Festival (Durham), and HJS Amsterdam. She has also led trainings with companies such as Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Norrdans, Tanz Linz, and Volkstheater Rostock, and has worked with students at institutions including Bruckneruni Linz, HfMDK Frankfurt, and Codarts Rotterdam.
In 2021, she co-founded the dance organization Selva with choreographer Rosana Ribeiro. She currently works as a dramaturge and, in 2024, took on the role of artistic director of the Salzburg-based PERFORMdANCE festival. Her research focuses on kinaesthetic empathy and the communicative potential of the moving body in an increasingly digitalized world.
We would like to thank the late Robert Hoch for providing the funds to support much of this project. Loyola University, Northwestern University, bim bom studios, & Chi-Shakti Yoga all provided free or reduced price space for our rehearsals and Subcircle for offered us a fantastic weeklong residency. This work would not exist without their support and yours. Thank you for showing up and seeing live art.