In January 2026, YDP launches Living, Rehearsing…, an evolving, genre-bending performance programme taking place throughout the building.

Living, Rehearsing… is conceived as a collaborative framework to test the possibilities of what YDP can be home to and how we might collectively reflect on the concept of rehearsal as a strategy for organising, reconfiguring and reimagining our lives as we venture into the unknown each day. Over the course of three months, the programme will invite an ensemble of artists from the fields of visual art, performance art, stand-up comedy, dance and sound to convene across four day-to-night events, where improvisation meets choreography. Each participant will offer an interpretation on the concept of ‘rehearsal’ and what it may mean to them, drawing on experiences of migration, contingency, navigating thresholds and channelling collective energies. The gatherings will also test a range of prompts and constraints set to explore different ways for audiences to explore the spaces around each performance, from simultaneous actions across multiple rooms, to moving through the building and experiencing collective resonances.

Inspired by the rhythmic patterns of chant, echoes and songs, Chapter 3 of Living, Rehearsing… explores how reverberance conjures kinship with one another, our ancestors, more-than-human life and the spiritual realms beyond.

This six-hour performance event brings together various acts of telling, remixing and co-creating memory and story, tracing personal, collective, material and symbolic journeys. The artists explore the acoustics of YDP through a series of actions and invocations, including passing beads as a physical score, embodying lost ancestral connections, adapting the building to the rhythm of a living clock, tracing feedback loops and summoning the memory of silver eels.

Attuning ourselves to this dynamic soundscape, we enter a state of deep attentiveness. Moving beyond passive listening, the gathering asks how we might actively generate our own energising transmissions and releases. This process both channels connections to other dimensions and grounds us in the present, evoking belonging and rituals of remembrance, re-routing human and non-human relations and mapping resonances to guide us through upheaval and change, wherever we may be.

Schedule

Room 1 13:00-19:00 Yingmei Duan 

Conservatory 13:00-19:00 Li Yilei

Artist’s Lab 13:00-19:00 Swilipino

Room 3 & Room 4 13:30-14:15 Aliaskar Abarkas 15:00-15:30 Sriwhana Spong 16:15-17:00 Yan Jun 18:00-18:40 Joshua Serafin with Pierre Bayet (aka Fake Moss) and Gorkem Sen

Joshua Serafin with Pierre Bayet (aka Fake Moss) and Gorkem Sen

Relics: An Eye Once Blind began with an exploration of the artist’s family history, tracing it back to their great-great-grandfather, Sentaro Esaki, a Japanese migrant worker who arrived in the Philippines in 1909. From this point, the artist delves into forgotten narratives and traces the erasure of an identity bound to an imaginary warrior lineage.

Debuting in the UK, an excerpt of the work at YDP marks the first collaboration between Serafin, multi-instrumentalist Gorkem Sen, and sound designer Pierre Bayet (aka Fake Moss), who come together to create an expanded sonic experience. This work was first commissioned by the Rockbund Art Museum for the Wan Hai Hotel, with further development of the work supported by Waking Life (Portugal), HORST Music & Arts Festival (Belgium), KAPUT Manila and ART SG Singapore.

Aliaskar Abarkas

‘Bring your poems, your voice and your prayers – to read, sing and make sounds together.’ — Aliaskar Abarkas

This participatory performance centres on an eight-metre-long chain of beads, crafted by the artist to serve as a physical score for a collective soundscape. Participants hold the beads, made from a range of everyday materials, and interpret them through touch, rhythm, voice and sonification, generating a shared, circular composition that unfolds in real time. The work explores alternative systems of notation, following how sound moves through people. Collective listening and attunement shape the experience, blending sense and nonsense, body, poetry and light.

Li Yilei

Not Yet Still (Runaway Self-Referential Loop) is a newly commissioned installation and performance exploring how ritual shapes attention and alters perception. For the six-hours of the programme, Li will occupy YDP’s Conservatory, positioning her work as a living clock that measures time through vibration, repetition and continuous movement. Visitors may enter and leave at any moment, much like glancing at a clock in a room or noticing one’s own breath. The sensation of duration subtly unsettles the certainty of time moving forward. Time becomes not something that passes, but something that is actively occupied.

Yingmei Duan

Duan’s six-hour performance is a form of continuous dialogue between the artist and the audience, using puppetry and other objects, drawing, video, sound, music and light as interconnected mediums. In response to the theme of Reverberance, past, present and future realities resonate with dreamscapes the artist conjures onsite. Following the logic of a rehearsal, the work has no fixed beginning or end. It continues to be reworked, emerging and transforming over time. As audiences engage with the artist, they bring their own experiences into the process, becoming part of a shared journey.

Swilipino

Swilipino has offered a culinary thread woven throughout the events of Living, Rehearsing… over the course of the programme. Marking their third participation, Swilipino presents their version of a kamayan – a Filipino communal feast in which food is laid out on banana leaves and eaten by hand. A pre-colonial tradition, the Tagalog term kamayan derives from kamay (hand), carrying associations of collectivity, place and shared action, and is often the beating heart of birthdays, holidays, gatherings and fiestas.

Yan Jun

'Every room creates specific conditions for potential resonances, waves and reflections. Through feedback, these phenomena can be revealed and observed. If we understand language as a recordable and translatable signal, it becomes possible to generate a real-time, site-specific feedback event — one that activates new kinds of signals before we can fully comprehend them.’ — Yan Jun

The musician and poet Yan Jun presents a performance of resonances, feedback loops and transmissions that move between signal and noise, in collaboration with an ensemble of participants who blend into the audience and space. Encouraging a fluid encounter between conductor, performer and environment, cues and responses gradually start to reveal themselves. The result is an atmosphere of collective attentiveness, where physical reactions, absurdist movements and non-verbal communication flow freely together.

Sriwhana Spong with Milo McKinnon

‘Blabryng fleschely tonge’. Repeat this phrase as it was originally written by an anonymous fourteenth-century contemplative, in The Cloud of Unknowing: ‘blabryng fleschely tonge, blabryng fleschely tonge, blabryng fleschely tonge’. Feel how the words accentuate the fleshy muscle of the tongue and how saliva accumulates, adding a sloshy wetness. Feel how the tongue slips awkwardly around the words, each letter sharp and straight like a bit in a horse’s mouth. Feel how your tongue moves like an eel in water. In 2019 and 2020, trackers placed on twenty-six European eels confirmed that the spawning place they instinctively returned to was somewhere in the spinning gyre of the Sargasso Sea. Its precise location, however, remains unknown. Blabryng fleschely tonge tracks the journeys of these silver eels, building a spiral of coordinates of knowledge that progresses by degrees without ever coinciding with its object. Along the way, resonances with a fourteenth-century meditation manual, in which animal consciousness is offered as an exemplar of the ability to experience not only what one is but that one is, swell, gather and recede.