John Moran
A Portrait of Görlitz

The residency involves collecting audio and visual material for a musical-theatrical portrait of real people from Görlitz. This will result in a production featuring dancers, performers, and musicians who reconstruct observed events and translate them into a musical and choreographic composition. The work continues a series of site-specific portraits that began in 2011 with “Etudes: Amsterdam” and in 2014 with “Goodbye, Thailand,” in which voice recordings of real people were integrated into theatrical formats.

The residency will take place in two two-week phases: April 24–May 8 and May 24–June 8. During the second phase, “Etudes: Amsterdam” will be presented, followed by a discussion with the audience.

Workshop: Communicating with the Audience:
Body Language and Pacing

Composer and performer John Moran offers a one-day workshop providing an overview of his signature techniques for theatrical timing and precise performance design aimed at conveying emotions to an audience. The focus is on an introduction to the origins of traditional forms of animation, as well as the working methods of selected American stage performers from the early days of television and their relevance to contemporary forms of performance art and theater.

The workshop is divided into two two-hour sessions and includes a presentation by the artist on these techniques, a video analysis of selected historical performances, and practical movement exercises with the participants.

John Moran

John Moran is an American composer and theater artist who has been making a name for himself internationally since the late 1980s with a unique form of music theater. His works are characterized by the combination of precisely composed sound structures, edited speech recordings, and rigorously choreographed movements. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he created works such as *The Manson Family* (opera), *Everyday*, *Newt Burman*, and *Matthew in the School of Life*, which garnered widespread international attention and were reviewed in leading media outlets, including *The New York Times*. Moran has lived and worked in Europe since 2004. With the Dresden-based everyone company, he continuously develops new productions for the European context, most recently The Revelation (2026).

John Moran is a resident at the Neisse Centre for Contemporary Arts as part of the residence plus residency program. residence plus is a project of Villa Wigman für Tanz e.V. and TanzNetzDresden e.V. in cooperation with the partners TanzART e.V. (Kirschau), Neisse Centre for Contemporary Arts e.V. (Görlitz), Kulturbaude und Landkunst e.V. (Heymannbaude Kleinhennersdorf), as well as TENZA and villa\wigman – Space for the Performing Arts (Dresden). “residence plus” is funded by the Saxon State Ministry of Science, Culture, and Tourism and the City of Dresden – Office for Culture and Monument Preservation. This initiative is co-financed by tax revenues based on the budget approved by the Saxon State Parliament.