Vanio Papadelli is a London-based movement and theatre artist, educator, mentor, performer and maker working across disciplines. She teaches in Universities and Conservatoires, such as Trinity Laban and Rose Bruford College. Her work engages with issues of vulnerability, memory and candidness fusing physicality, video, autobiography and text into poetic, surreal and immersive environments and has been shown in Greece, UK, Italy, Poland, Germany, Egypt and Lebanon. Feminism, ecology, surrealism, ritual and phenomenology strongly inspire her practice. Key practitioners who have influenced her work include Song of the Goat Theatre, Farm in the Cave, Studio Matejka, Meg Stuart, Nancy Stark Smith, and Miranda Tufnell.
Vanio has co-created with artist and movement/drama therapist Tania Batzoglou the life-long performance ritual project titled CANDID that reflects on female friendships. She has co-facilitated with Rakhee Jasani intergenerational projects for women that combine yoga, movement, and writing (funded by Culture Seeds Mayor of London) and has facilitated and organised various other community projects. As a performer, she has worked for and collaborated with an eclectic mix of theatre, dance and performance artists (Theatre Lab, Athletes of the Heart Lab, Jia-Yu Corti, aswespeakproject, Alex Crowe, Nesreen Nabil Hussein).

Natalie Katsou is a theatre director, a dramaturg, a playwright, a workshop facilitator and a lecturer in Theatre and Performing Arts, currently at Goldsmiths and London Metropolitan University. She was born in Athens and she lives in London. She has worked extensively in the UK and abroad (Greece, Germany, Sweden, Turkey, and Hungary) in theatre and in creative environments. Her plays discuss gender and gender identities, human rights, neurodiversity, migration and cultural identity, investing in improvisations, performative actions and modes of interpretation. Her texts have met the stage in the UK and in Greece, whilst her work has been published and nominated for literature awards. She holds an MFA in Theatre Directing, whilst her PhD focuses on spectral readings, memory and narrative, presence and absence, journeys of processing loss and trauma. She has been the founder and artistic director of Operaview, an interdisciplinary opera company merging contemporary with visual and performing arts. For more details: www.nataliekatsou.com

Vanio Papadelli, as a movement artist and performer, and Natalie Katsou, as a dramaturg and theatre director, are currently developing the solo performance ‘Laughing Gas’, based on a concept by Vanio, exploring the birth-giving process and its embodiments.