Ki 氣 Dance Festival - Forum

Chaedo

A Seoul-based dancer and director who combines street dance and contemporary movement into a distinctive choreographic style. His work utilises isolation techniques and inventive spatial angles, creating a genre-transcending language. A graduate of Baekje University of the Arts, he has seven years of professional experience teaching freestyle dance and choreography. Chaedo is the leader of the Palette Art Crew, hosting jam sessions, showcases, and battles to promote respect and artistic exchange across dance scenes in South Korea and Australia. As a performer, he received recognition at the prestigious Body Rock Dance Competition. Notably, he served as the choreographer for the 105th National Sports Festival Opening Performance with 160 dancers and performed for the LG Arts Center Opening under Kim Seol-jin.

MaggZ

An award-winning movement artist, choreographer, educator, and creative director of Chinese-minority descent, MaggZ is trained in ballet and now specialises in w_acking—a freestyle dance originating in 1970s Los Angeles from the Latinx and African American queer community, characterised predominantly by arm movements. Rooted at the intersection of street dance, site-specific installation, and technology, and extending into somatic and relational research, community-building, and sustainability, MaggZ’s practice is hybrid, timeless, visceral, and unapologetic as they continually outbox themselves. In 2024, MaggZ founded (nexus), an experimental movement experience cultivating infrastructures that support innovation, experimentalism, and discovery across the creative community. MaggZ was appointed Young Artistic Directorate at Next Wave in 2023 (Melbourne, Australia), Producer in Residence in 2022 (Melbourne, Australia), and producer/performance art consultant at Collide24 in 2022 (Berlin, Germany), and is the recipient of the Young Creative Awards (2020) with four nominations from the Green Room Awards.

ooshcon

Embedded in love and devoted to flow, ooshcon is a Samoan theatre maker who specialises in free-body methodologies, with the core belief ‘ina ia sosolo le alofa / so love may flow’ guiding their evolving practice and way of being as a compass that ensures all words, actions, and work emerge from or move towards alofa (love). ooshcon’s work is grounded in and activated through the forms and philosophies of Waving Dance culture, Krump Dance culture, Physical Theatre, Animation Dance, Geometric Dance, breath-work, and character/entity-building, which they embrace with emotional rigour and innovative theatrical practices in pursuit of ‘formlessness’. Alongside collaborating artists, ooshcon is one of the creative directors of CONJAH, a collective that kit-bashes genres to create political and meaningful theatrical experiences.

REINS

As a Japanese-Australian dance artist, REINS’ practice spans experimental choreography, education, and curation, deeply rooted in her “third culture kid” upbringing across Japan, India, Thailand, and Australia, and drawing on intergenerational knowledge to navigate diasporic experiences. Her movement practice is shaped by contemporary dance enmeshed with Japanese somatic training—ideas of old ways and new waves, 間 (ma) as concepts of in-between-ness, and the practice of “labbing”—alongside a philosophy of training anywhere, anytime, which is central to her life in regional South Coast NSW and to sustaining practice in regional communities more broadly. By blending street forms with her background in contemporary dance, ballet, and surfing, REINS facilitates raw, instinctive expression and views these movement styles as manifestations of life-giving power, fostering cultural exchange and collective connection through movement.

Thv Flood

Maxwell "Thv Flood" Douglas, is a multidisciplinary artist and originator of local Australian dance style, Flood. Representing the city of Ipswich, ThvFlood has been active in underground Australian street culture for over a decade, through street dance, beatmaking, theatre and community development in the neighbourhoods. ThvFlood has won 20+ battles in Australia, including winning Australia's biggest battle Destructive Steps in 2022, with placings internationally, along with being a workshop facilitator all over Australia and overseas. 

* Flood is an artform of music and dance that is a response to the flood plains of Ipswich, Australia. Flood dance is characterised by its extruded and distorted shape

Palette Session

Palette Session is a cross-cultural dance collective in Seoul and Sydney providing spaces for dancers from all backgrounds to experiment, connect and grow creatively. 

Rooted in street dance culture, Palette Session runs freestyle dance workshops, jam sessions and dance battles which gather diverse dance communities into a collaborative, inclusive space.

We have run 200 events for 780 dancers drawing from practices in hip hop, breaking, punking/w_acking, house, vogue femme, Pangalay, Bodyweather, Bharatanatyam, Japanese cultural dance, somatic practice, contact improvisation and more.