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Sheena McGrandles

Heavy Weight

Heavy Weight is a choreographic research by Sheena McGrandles and Claire Vivianne Sobottke investigating what bodies are capable of. The research explores weight, gravity, exhaustion, suspension, and resistance, asking how strength is gendered, how failure can become virtuosic, and how impossible acts reveal the limits and possibilities of the body.

Structured in four chapters — Heavy Stunt, Funny, Eloquent, and Resistance — the work moves between slapstick, political speech, eroticism, and physical collision to choreograph what it means to carry, push, and hold.

By and with Sheena McGrandles, Vivianne Sobottke

Sheena McGrandles

Sheena McGrandles is an Irish choreographer and performer based in Berlin. Her hybrid practice spans choreography, performance, teaching, curating, and collaborative work, including the artist-led collectives PSR and neue häute / agora. Her choreographic research focuses on radical temporality — slowing down, suspending, or hyper-editing movement to transform the everyday. This inquiry informs the series Radical Temporalities & Illogical Intimacies, which includes FIGURED, FLUSH, and as long as you want, which premiered at HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Alongside this work, she develops autobiographical pieces that engage with large-scale theatrical genres: DAWN: A Musical on Reproduction, MINT: An Opera on Money, and TOIL. She has been invited twice to Tanzplattform Deutschland and, since 2024, has received structural funding (Basisförderung).