By Laura Evans
In November 2025, three women led a group of disabled artists into a Bali studio with a suitcase full of technology and an open question: what can dance be when sound, movement, and inclusion are designed together from the start?
Sonic Moves was a five-day residency, 23–27 November 2025 in Bali, Indonesia. It was led by Finnish-born electronic music producer and neurodivergent artist Liina Turtonen (LNA), alongside UK disabled dance artist Lauren Russell and Bali-based inclusive dance practitioner Tiara Brahmarani. We Are Epic acted as in-country producers, providing the infrastructure, partnerships, and on-the-ground support that made the project possible.
The project was funded by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture programme, which Liina applied to as a neurodivergent artist. Connections Through Culture supports UK artists to build genuine international partnerships: relationships that generate lasting creative and cultural impact on both sides, not just one-off exchanges.
From the start, the residency was disabled and female-led. Liina, Lauren, and Tiara are all women; two are disabled artists. That wasn’t incidental. It was the foundation. The questions they brought into the studio, the methods they used, and the values they worked from were all shaped by their own embodied experience of making and accessing art.
Alongside them, a group of Indonesian disabled dancers and artists, including breakdancer Arif OneLegz and participants Widya, Wahyu, Jasmine, Kadek, and Jigo, brought their own practices, perspectives, and movement histories into the room. Nine artists in total. One shared curiosity about what was possible between them.
Liina: Leading with Technology, Learning from the Room
Liina Turtonen is a neurodivergent artist whose practice sits at the intersection of electronic music, interactive design, and live performance. She makes music that responds to bodies in space: copper tape on the floor that triggers sound when stepped on, motion detection cameras that translate hand movements into live audio, and a range of tools that turn gesture and touch into sound. She performs under the name LNA and runs her own channel, LNA Does Audio Stuff, where she shares her practice with a growing international audience.
If you want to see what her tools look and sound like in action, including the Videosync visuals that played such a key role in making the residency accessible for Deaf dancers, her recent video is a good place to start:
The video includes footage from the Sonic Moves residency, filmed by Arif Setyo Budi.
Applying to Connections Through Culture was a significant moment, and one she took as a neurodivergent artist, making the case that her practice and the specific questions it opens up about access and sensation had real things to offer Indonesian disabled dancers. It was a case well made.
That encounter, between Liina’s cutting-edge interactive tools and the rich tradition of Balinese movement, became one of the creative engines of the week.
Building Access In
With Deaf dancers in the group, visual accessibility was a core part of Liina’s technical design. Her systems were configured so that the visual projections became a live, real-time mirror of the sound. Everything the hearing dancers could hear, the Deaf dancers could see as shifting images on the screen.
This dual sound-and-image approach shaped the whole week. Rather than running alongside the dance as a separate track, the visual element became integral to how every dancer, hearing and Deaf, experienced and responded to the space. Several dancers highlighted the visual feedback as one of the most resonant parts of the work.
Three Ways of Making Sound Move
Over the five days, the group developed three distinct techniques, each one creating a different relationship between technology, body, and the space between people.
Sound & Body: Liina sang live, a cappella, moving alongside the dancers and responding in real time to what she saw. The human voice as instrument. Tiara described the contrast between the organic, natural sound and the electronic elements as striking. Liina found that being in amongst the dancers, rather than operating at a remove, made what was happening unusually readable for an audience.
The Floor Speaks: Copper tape laid across the studio floor created an interactive sound map: step on it and it triggers sound, or shifts the image on the projected screen. Immediate, playful, and crucially visual. For Deaf dancers, the changing images on the microboard made the interaction legible in a way that sound alone couldn’t. Jigo described it as playful. Liina called it simple and effective.
Moving Sound: For the final showcase, Liina used a Leap Motion camera to track her hand movements in real time, shaping and responding to sound as she moved through the space. The dancers responded to what they heard and saw; Liina responded to what she saw them do. A cycle of call and response that raised live questions about where creative authorship sits and how it can be shared. Earlier in the week the group had also explored Apple Watch and Orba technology, with the dancers using these tools to move sound and image themselves.
The Practice That Held It Together
Liina’s technology was the most visually striking element of the residency. But it was held within a framework of inclusive dance practice that Lauren Russell and Tiara Brahmarani built and led. Without that, the technology would have been just equipment in a room.
Lauren Russell is a disabled dance artist and wheelchair user who brought a practice built around genuinely open choreography: multiple entry points, movement that belongs to every body, and the principle that access is designed in from the start. She led a session called ‘Facilitating Inclusively’, sharing not just techniques but the values behind them, and inviting the group into an honest conversation about what inclusion actually demands.
Part of that facilitation meant thinking carefully about language. With three spoken languages in the room, Lauren deliberately built in visual tools, fabric arrows and large dice, to reduce reliance on spoken language and interpretation. The group met that with patience and generosity.
Tiara Brahmarani is one of Indonesia’s leading inclusive dance practitioners. A central aim of the residency was to support her professional development and to create genuine, peer-to-peer exchange between UK and Indonesian approaches to inclusive practice. Tiara led her own session, sharing her practice, her cultural context, and the ways Indonesian approaches differ from, challenge, and enrich what Lauren and Liina brought with them.
For Lauren, one of the most striking things she took home from Tiara’s practice was a simple but powerful introductory technique: participants opening by naming what they can and can’t do: “I can see, I can hear, I can’t walk.”
This was not knowledge flowing one way. It was three women, each an expert in her own field, learning from each other in real time. The technology was extraordinary. The inclusive practice, led jointly and equally by all three, is what made it land.
What the Technology Opened Up
For Tiara, who had not worked with interactive technology before, the residency fundamentally shifted what she understood inclusion to mean.
What stayed with her most was watching the Deaf dancers engage with the technology in real time, their responses, their feedback, the way they shaped what the work became.
Jigo, one of the Bali-based disabled dancers, put it simply:
For Lauren, the technology shifted something specific in her own practice and sparked ideas she’s already thinking about how to apply back in the UK:
Arif: Dancing Into the Future
Arif OneLegz is an Indonesian breakdancer and one of We Are Epic’s longest-standing collaborators. He was part of the group throughout, bringing his own movement practice into conversation with everything Liina, Lauren, and Tiara were developing. For him, the residency opened up entirely new creative ground.
Arif was struck by how the technology opened dance up to everyone, regardless of background, training, or disability. He saw in Liina’s tools a practical answer to questions he’d long held about what dance that works for everyone really means in practice:
What he wants to carry forward is clear: technique that works for all people, with or without disability, and technology designed so that Deaf dancers can feel as well as see. Not accommodation. Design.
What the Public Saw
On the final day, the doors opened for a public sharing. Invited stakeholders watched as nine artists demonstrated their three techniques, each introduced by the artists who had developed them. The moment Liina says she will remember longest came when the audience was invited to try the copper tape themselves.
For Lauren, what resonated most was watching individuals find their confidence over the course of the week and carry it into the sharing.
For Tiara, the moment that stayed with her was what happened after the performance ended.
For Jigo, it was the performance itself, the simple, powerful fact of everyone being on stage together:
What Comes Next
Liina left Bali with a notebook full of ideas, all born directly from conversations with the dancers:
Lauren is already thinking about how to apply what she experienced, particularly for deafblind participants she works with in the UK:
Tiara is thinking about what she can bring back to her community in Bali, starting with the choreography methods she found most transferable:
And Arif speaks for the whole group when he says:
That’s the intention. Sonic Moves wasn’t a one-off. It was a beginning, a set of relationships, techniques, and questions that will keep generating work.
Sonic Moves was funded by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture programme, applied for by Liina Turtonen as a neurodivergent artist. We Are Epic acted as in-country producers. We Are Epic is a UK-based inclusive arts organisation working internationally to connect, develop, and champion disabled artists.