Around the name NON GRATA there have been different hushes and shushes for a long time. Already from the point of view of death of conventionalization of art it has embodied the horrible and unwanted disembodiment of human person, from which the meaninglessness of nowadays art, is pouring out. For those, whose world of arts starts from the point, where the art world ends, NON GRATA has been a liberator, the orphic gap in the seemingly unalterable course, which however betrays us, it is a cure from incest. The main point of the group is ethical - it is the image of primitivism, impersonality and experimental creativity. The performances of the group take place according to the logic of avoiding codes. The presentations are physical texts, whose ways of orthography and reading are kept within limits of real actions by the groupmembers. Aesthetical and provocative challenges are represented in places, where the Art World doesn't work.

Samuel Penaso's works are a mix of his experiments in media including painting, performance, sculpture, installation and video among others. Penaso is influenced by his dichotomy of life experiences as a child growing up in the country and as an adult living in the city. Experiences, emotions and stories about him and others are widely expressed in his works, most notably in his portraits. His work generates waves of nostalgia, weaving the purity of childhood experiences together with his present ideologies.

Penaso is a visual and performance artist from Manila, philippines. He received a BFA at the Technological University of the Philippines. He has held solo exhibitions in Japan, Thailand, Austria, Germany, Singapore, among others. He represented the Philippines in the Nippon International Performance Art Festival in both 2005 and 2011 and has participated in the the Asian International Art Exhibition, Ayala Museum, Manila; ArTriangle, Malaysia and Young Art Philippines, Luxembourg. He is one of the core members of Tupada Action and Media Art (TAMA) a group of performance artists and an active member of the Art Association of Philippines (AAP).

Nestor Tobchy's work interweaves paradoxical strands of thought, incongruous painting techniques, disparate artistic traditions, and antithetical pictorial attitudes to express a coherent and pantheistic vision of reality.

While in school in Baltimore in 1981, Topchy chanced upon an exhibition of Yves Klein’s IKB work. Topchy credits Klein’s use of a saturated ultramarine blue pigment that represented “the void” as a pivotal discovery. After using this color on spherical sculptures, Topchy realized their connection to Pysanky, the ornately decorated Ukrainian Easter eggs he made in childhood with his mother and grandmother.

Following in Klein’s footsteps, Topchy earned a black belt in judo under Karl Geiss, which led to studies in Buddhism and a deeper understanding of his Ukrainian roots and identity as a dual American and Canadian citizen.

Rats in cages or why I don’t hurt myself with my art anymore
When I was nine years old for some reason I hated school. Pretending to be sick was not very effective as an excuse so I subconsciously came up with the idea of REALLY being sick. Every morning during the Pledge I would run to the trash can and, “with liberty and justice for all” vomit into it for a free ticket to the nurse and often on to my Grandmother’s for fun and popsicles. In time I lost so much weight that I was hospitalized. After many tests were negative the doctor said, “Let’s change his room in school.” It seemed to work. I gained weight and stopped vomiting.

In one psychological experiment examining fight or flight responses to electric shock, it was found that one rat in a cage would escape when possible. Two rats in one cage with no escape would fight each other. One rat in cage with no way out and no one to fight would turn his fight instincts onto himself, weaken and die. When I worked in the Austin State Hospital in Austin, TX, I saw a lot of rats in a no escape cage who were so drugged they couldn’t fight. I found one patient who drew all day as a way of fighting his demons instead of himself. I became his friend and advocate. I did a lot of reading about mental illness and began to wonder if the individual’s response might be a perfectly sane response to a society gone mad.

When I left there I decided to make art, my escape into the safe cage. I found my fight and flight in learning to paint. In hindsight, I see that my performance art was about that nine year old boy who couldn’t escape and couldn’t fight. My performance ego was used to shocking his body by gorging on mayonnaise or picante sauce and then vomiting it out while singing Close to You. Certainly there were metaphors about living in the most egregiously consumptive society in the history of man and there were statements about masks, disgust and intimacy. But mostly it was about trying to help that nine year old boy to not hurt himself and speak up and become an emotionally mature adult.

The poor kid was never the same after returning to the Gulag Elementary. He knew he was back in the cage and his school pictures show the loss of joy and innocence all over his face. From then on I became a nonconformist, knowing that it was my flight vehicle from the cage. Out of this realization, sensitivity and intelligence, comes my art ? existing where there are no cages. I feel so blessed to believe myself to be free. If trapped alone, I’ll run. If trapped with anyone else, I’ll fight.

A composite group of dancers, musicians and artists who formed
together in 2000 around the renowned master dancer-choreographer-director Mushimaru Fujieda and the group became the Physical Poets, emphasizing the lyrical beauty and physicality of their work.

Dancers within the Physical Poets have also created their own smaller dance troupes, the all-male Alakan and the all-female group, "Sakiminohime". Individual members of these two groups will also be performing.

The Physical Poets combines traditional Japanese dance with "Butoh", one of the newer contemporary dance movements of modern Japan. the group has based its dance techniques upon body control utilizing the
breathing methods for the training of Yoga, Qigong and Zen as they believe the human spirit and body constitute an inseparable entity