Riley Davidson

ACTOR

DANCER

PERFORMER

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

RILEY DAVIDSON (they/them) is a queer non-binary performance artist, dancer and theater maker based in Berlin. As an autodidact, their work spans many genres including immersive/participatory theater, experience design, drag, contemporary dance, grief tending and durational performance art.

Through all shapes their work may take, Davidson creates containers in which audience members can explore their own agency and vulnerability in relation to the subject matter.

Ranging from comedic to contemplative, Davidson employs a critical lens towards the interwoven systems of oppression with a focus on capitalism and its long term effects on the collective nervous system. Davidson creates work tailored to invite the audience to question what is taken for granted within these social constructs. Davidsons work is in response to the needs of their community. They offer their work to imagine liberatory futures through the catharsis of collective grief and joy as resistance.

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PERFORMANCE

[R]evolution Irresistible

Berlin Fashion Week 2025

Created for Melisa Minca’s Berlin Fashion week show, winter of 2025. The piece is inspired by Adrienne Marie Browns book “pleasure activism”. It contemplates how caring for one another in a time of overlapping crisis gives us the collective power we need to move from apathy to action. It also draws from the book “Faggots and Friends in the midst of a Revolution” to remind us that the glamour queer joy possesses is instrumental to our fight for liberation.

Grief Canyon

Whole Festival Germany 2025

Grief Canyon is an allegory of how personal grief connects us to collective grief. A manifesto to the power that lies in grieving publicly. A ritual to guide us through the darkness of loss and into the light of a new world. Collective grief when metabolised enables us to move towards right action, to create a future in which our beloved would be proud to take part in. Through drag, dance, text and sound design Grief Canyon explores how grief carves us into something new, spacious and beautiful if we let it.

Three Phases of My Mental Illness

Tipsy Bear Berlin 2025

Following a prolonged disassociate episode I created this piece. It connects the three stages of general adaption syndrome and the three phases of matter from solid, liquid to gas. General adaptation syndrome is the physiological changes your body goes through when under stress: from alarm/reaction stage (fight/flight). To resistance stage (your body attempting to adapt to continued stress activation). And finally to the exhaustion stage (burnout, depression etc.).

Alarm stage is linked to solid matter when one is still able to respond to the stress. Resistance stage is the phase of water, when ones nervous system is attempting to be resilient and take the shape of the container. Finally is exhaustion – air ; when your capacity to function is scattered and dispersed.

Grief Garden Party

Brücke Museum, ONSITE Residency Berlin 2023

Grief Garden Party is a facilitated collective grieving experience through performance art and story. It is the story about Big Grief and Small Grief, narrated by the Director performed by Davidson. This character guides the participants through Grünewald Forest, where they are introduced to 5 species of local flora based on their medicinal properties, mythology, response to climate change and migration history. Each species forms a character in the Directors theater. The guests are met with a golden invitation with a task upon arrival and through the journey are being invited to a tea party arranged in a handwoven nest inside of the forest. At the end of the piece everyone is invited to both bury their grief and to share something about it.

Experience design, participatory performance

Photos: Loup Delfandre

Care Ritual

Luchbox Candy, Club Aeden Berlin 2024

Care ritual is a form of collective ritual

– self care that gets extended into community care.

The recipe:

Enter the dance floor as a party guest, cool and self composed.

Enter the “bathroom” and remove all clothing and jewelry.

Stretch the body and release the hair.

Bathe self in the tub, removing makeup last, the final defense.

Towel dry self and begin to massage golden oil starting from the feet,

focusing on centering and care.

Once covered in golden oil, offer hand massages to guests at the party,

focusing on service and gentleness.

Repeat until finished.

Photo: Loup Delfandre

Iconic

Lunchbox Candy, Club Aeden Berlin 2024

Iconic is a performative allegory merging the historic uses of iconography and the contemporary vernacular of “Iconic” in Queer communities. The piece begins with a spray painting: “Thou shall have no Gods before me”. A Pope inspired outfit reveals a slick oily underskin. Self-anointment in unholy water and bathing in wine. Bandages are removed and refracting mirrors are revealed. The isolation of being placed on a pedestal becomes evident. The distance created between the worshiper and the icon serves both to make holy and to place in a hierarchy ourselves below that which is made holy.

Performance, Embodied storytelling, drag, contemporary dance, sound design

Photos: Michaela Haider