Riley Davidson
PERFORMER
DIRECTOR
DANCER
Riley Davidson (they/them) is a Berlin based interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of performance, ritual and social critique. Davidson works with participatory performance as a tool for embodied political education through myth adaptation and ritual.
Using their homebrewed methodology – Nervous System Arc – they unearth complex social constructs and offer them as digestible experiences that place a priority of learning through the body and story rather than through the mind of the participants. The cosmology of Davidson’s work is centered around collective grief integration, mythopoetics, and ritual as meaning making.
A self proclaimed “feral artist”, their work is both site and community specific; an affective response to their social topography, an invitation to disassemble and reconstruct the structures that govern us. They have a background in film and television acting, butoh, clowning, contemporary dance and subculture performance styles like drag, burlesque and ritual performance.
Davidson created, produced, directed and performed in: Descent – Berlin Germany, GOOCH Theater and Hošek Contemporary 2025. Death Drive in – Gothenberg Sweden, Kulturtemplet 2022 – Berlin Germany, Alte Münze 2023 & 2024.
RECENT GRANTS & RECIDENCIES:
2024 Marina Abramović Institute bursary grant for the Cleaning the House series
2023 Resident of ONSITE Festival, Brücke museum, Berlin
2022 Grant for Death Drive-In, Gothenburg Culture council, Sweden
2018 > present Performer in the Berlin Frei Kunst scene.
Work hosted by festivals & party collectives such as Lunchbox Candy (Berlin, 2022 – 2025), Waking Life (Portugal, 2024 – present), Whole Festival (Germany, 2022-2024) and Fusion (Germany, 2022 & 2023).
GET IN CONTACT:
GROUP WORK
DEATH DRIVE-IN (2023-24, BERLIN)
DIRECTOR, WRITER, ACTOR
Goethe Institut, Swedish Arts Grant Committee
DEATH DRIVE-IN (2022, SWEDEN)
DIRECTOR, WRITER, ACTOR
MEA CULPA (2021, SWEDEN)
ACTOR, PERFORMANCE DIRECTOR
SOLO WORK
DESCENT
90mil & Hošek Contemporary Berlin 2025
Davidson(they/them) premiered their first solo show, Descent, in April of 2025 at 90mil Black Box Theater with a second run of sold-out shows at Hošek Contemporary the following September. Directed, produced, choreographed and performed by Davidson, in collaboration with Cellist & Composer Moritz Ebert (he/him) and Sound Designer Juan Cernadas (they/them).
Descent is a ritual-performance weaving together contemporary dance, Butoh, mythic possession and collectivized grieving. The myth is one the oldest recorded texts in history (2100 BCE), coming from the ancient Sumerian civilization which existed in present day Iraq. The myth is adapted from its original context and holds urgent resonance as we collectively descend into the polycrisis of climate catastrophe, increased militarization, cultural fragmentation and existential exhaustion.
“DESCENT is not entertainment. It’s ritual. It’s grief performance. It’s a myth ripped out of Mesopotamia and stuffed into the Instagram age, where every conquest is content and every trauma is livestreamed”
“„So viel Zerstörung entsteht daraus, dass wir ständig unseren Verstand über alles andere setzen. Ich wollte eine Erfahrung schaffen, die Menschen durchleben können, ohne sie rationalisieren zu müssen”, sagt Davidson. Das Ergebnis ist eine schonungslose Einladung, gemeinsam zu fühlen, und eine Erfahrung, die nachhallt.”
Producer, Director, Choreographer & Performer: Riley Davidson
Composer & Cellist: Moritz Moritz Ebert
Sound Design: Juan Cernadas
Light Design & Technician: Malicia Biche
Dramaturg: Hadrien Daigneault-Roy
Assistant Producer: Zahraa Samer
Set & Prop Design: Sofía Loose Martínez de Castro & Omar Sherif
Head piece: Sofía Loose Martínez de Castro
Photographer: Julie Roubinet
Videographer: Mayar Attia
Clean Grrrl Aesthetics for The End Times
The Plastics Live – 90mil March 2026
Created with DJ Gigi FM’s live project, The Plastics, at 90mil in March of 2026. A 30min butoh performance. An apocalyptic care ritual. A balancing act between face masks and chainsmoking, dental hygiene and rinsing with beer.
Filmed by: Lolita Naudot
[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.).
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
Don’t Touch The Art
Diskohek Melancholie 2, Berlin 2019
A participatory performance in which the audience was invited to manipulate and decorate Riley’s body as a live canvas – duration 2 hours.
Photos: Astra Pentaxia
Are You The Moon?
Kake, Berlin 2019
A spoken word and contemporary dance piece performed blindfolded and surrounded by the audience.
Photos: Astra Pentaxia
DON’T TOUCH THE ART
A participatory performance in which the audience was invited to manipulate and decorate Riley’s body as a live canvas – duration 2 hours.
Photos: Astra Pentaxia
ARE YOU THE MOON?
A spoken word and contemporary dance piece performed blindfolded and surrounded by the audience.
Photos: Astra Pentaxia
movement
DAZED x CALVIN CLEIN
Dancer, voice-over
Director: Adam Cunnings
VISCIOUS UNCONSCIOUS (2022, BERLIN)
Dancer, director, co-producer
LOOP (2021, BERLIN)
Dancer
Director/dop: Laura Rus
