The Lock-Up

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE / Manu Anima and Maria Metsalu

31st August – 10th September, 2025

Live at The Lock-Up welcomes Maria Metsalu and Manu Anima, members of the shapeshifting, international dance collective, Young Boy Dancing Group, presenting a one-night-only live performance 2 Sep 2025. YBDG will utilise the residency to meet and rehearse with local performers, developing and delivering a rare and electrifying performance supported by The Lock-Up’s Artist in Residence Program 2025.

ABOUT YOUNG BOY DANCING GROUP

Initiated in 2014, Young Boy Dancing Group began as a nameless performance collective, a versatile host embracing an ever-changing network of dancers. Young Boy Dancing Group has worked in video, photography, fashion, sculpture, and installation, but the group remains best known for raw, intimate performances, in which the materiality of bodies encounters the ethereality of light.

YBDG performances have been held at among many other venues in: 2024 at Gessneralle, Zurich, Performance Space, New York City, Rhizome, New York City, 2023 at Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo, O’Flaherty’s, New York City, 2019 at Disappearing Berlin, Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin, BOFFO, NYC, Festival Ceremonia, Mexico, Baltic Triannial, Tallinn, Athens Bienalle, Athens, Creepy Teepee, Kutna Hora.

Spike Magazine writes: “Since making their debut as a performance group at Paris’s Club Silencio in 2014, eccentric tactics earning early viral fame have matured into immersive studies in physical intensity, sensuality, and extreme absurdity.”

Sam Max for Culture Bot writes: ”In their work, I experience Young Boy Dancing Group as hovering between life and death. The choreography sustains suspension between a quivering, levitating ecstasy of the body and spirit, and the inevitable silence of death. None of it is easy, but we do it anyway, and the best we can ask for is a collective ritual, maybe in the form of a dance, that makes meaning of it all. In this way Young Boy Dancing Group’s language is just like life. It’s as devastated as it is celebratory. The dance is something to be moved through, despite the constant threat of collapse.”