Tender Structures — performance photo 2

Installation & Movement Performance

Tender Structures

Research — Come Together(11) Festival, Amsterdam NL — 2026

Full Performance

Tender Structures — performance photo 1

The Research

We gathered as many bodies, minds, and hearts as we could into one shared space, all searching for the many meanings of home. How does a home look? What does it feel like? Where does your idea of home come from and where has your search for one taken you along the way? Is home a feeling you can't quite describe or a place bound by the architecture of four walls and a sky? For us, we found most of our curiosity lived inside the conversations, in the questions that surfaced through the research rather than in the need to arrive at a single, certain answer. As the hours and days of research went on, new perspectives came and went, and along the way we realized there could never be one answer to our question even if we hoped for one… which we didn't.

Sound Score

Original sound scores composed for Tender Structures — sonic investigations into the architecture of belonging.

I rummaged the space between your body and mine Searching for a tender sentiment I attempt to gather my mind into my body But my it has found its way entangled within yours

Tender Structures — performance photo 3

The Work

Tender Structures is an installation and movement performance that traces home as something felt, built, lost, and reimagined. Two bodies search for a place to land, to be held, to recognize themselves; sometimes that home is a room, a person, or a fleeting sensation under the skin. Hovering between the domestic and the ethereal, the piece queers the familiar — unsettling norms, reframing the mundane, and asking how bodies carve out space when traditional notions of belonging fall short. It invites the audience into an intimate, shifting landscape where sanctuary is fragile, sensation becomes holy.

A tender structure is a scaffold of intention, raised between a seeker and a finder— a lattice of needs woven in careful lines, where hopes are measured, offers unfold, and possibilities gather at the edges. An informal doorway, built of questions and requirements, yet softened by the quiet hoping, that the right hands will answer, the right home will meet the call.

A tender structure stands like a form of sought promise— inviting, awaiting, holding the space for trust to come inside. If intimacy had ears, It would be a patient company hearing you before your body arrived through the door listening for its own needs, then placing them in tandem with yours But if intimacy had ears, would it make us better listeners? Or would we begin to take her listening for granted?

Tender Structures — two bodies intertwined

Zine

Zine

A digital zine accompanying the work — coming soon.

Coming Soon

Collaborations

Dancer & Collaborator

Doran Lavanon

Photo & Documentation

Nikko Axzul

Set Design

Adriana Sophia Rohde

Creative Direction, Design, Sound, Choreography & World Building

Siena Avalon Ciancia

All photography by Nikko Axzul