Reverse Cowgirl II: Ride To The Top presents three women* from three generations: New York author/theorist McKenzie Wark joins on video, while Ariadne Randall and Nis Brender are live on stage. Ariadne Randall has a musical and artistic background, Nis Brender is a trained dancer and choreographer. Ariadne Randall’s practice is rooted in a fusion of influences of Zen kōans, low theory, medieval and post-war composition, blending technology and poetry. The performance has autobiographical features: Dancing was prohibited in the Christian American community where she grew up as the child of a traveling apocalyptic evangelist and a Gospel singer. Now she dances with another woman for the first time: is she her double, her sister, her competitor, her friend, her lover? In the second part, the women* put on a rave dance against social prejudice and female norms of beauty, exploring the utopia of the dancefloor. They question what makes a woman a woman and deconstruct the vulnerability of beauty. McKenzie Wark, who wrote a new text specifically for the piece, will be part of the performance via video.

Ariadne Randall is an American artist, composer and writer based in Vienna. Her work practices worldbuilding through transmedia narrative. Through strategies of material depth and formal juxtaposition, she creates spaces for imagination in sound, language and image. She holds degrees in classical composition and contemporary art from UCLA and Bard MFA. Her work has been heard widely, from Lincoln Center and a recent song cycle for the Volksoper Wien to countless basements. Her Reverse Cowgirl Quartet rides her gender transition towards larger questions of identity and becoming. Her debut record as a transgender woman was released to critical acclaim in 2024 on Oxtail Recordings. She is represented by Galerie Peter Gaugy (Brussels/Vienna).

Nis Fee Brender is a dancer, performer and teacher. Raised in the Circo Soluna theatre circus, she started appearing in circus shows at the age of two and learned the crafts of aerial acrobatics, trapeze, vaulting, unicycling, tightrope and acting. She later studied at Varium Espai de Moviment, Barcelona, New Education for Contemporary Dance, Härnösand, and SEAD, Salzburg, where she graduated in 2024. Nis Fee Brender has worked with Romeo Castellucci, Olivier Dubois, Alice Rohrwacher, Rhizomatic Circus Collective and Amanda Piña, among others.

McKenzie Wark is best known for a series of books on 21^st century critical theory and on alternative histories of Marxism. Her most recent, post-transition works of autofiction and autotheory – including Raving, Reverse Cowgirl and Love and Money, Sex and Death – brought her a lot of media attention. She is a professor of media and cultural theory at the New School in New York.

Theodosia Roussos is a composer, sopranist and oboist. She performed with the Los Angeles as well as the Boston Philharmonics and as a soloist at the 2017 European Capital of Culture. She also wrote film scores for Miranda July, Netflix and Amazon. Theodosia Roussos has collaborated with John Luther Adams, Butch Morris, George Lewis and Bang on a Can and plays the oboe for stars such as Ariana Grande, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Weird Al.