(A)Temporal Movements

In the framework of our project HOW WILL YOU ASCERTAIN TIME? in collaboration with MAGICAL HACKERISM, we warmly invite you to participate in (A)temporal Movements – a movement workshop series with Amna Mawaz, Regina Lomio, and Venuri Perera.

What does it mean to be deeply present?

During this 3-day workshop series, we will explore how movement as dance and embodiment practices inform and influence the individual body's experience of time and how the body perceives time in relation to surrounding bodies and structures whether in choreographed or free movement. As the lines between private and public space are becoming increasingly blurred and social encounters interiorised, we will also seek to know how we can learn to just be in a shared space to destabilize and disorient perception and perceived identities and stereotypes in order to make ourselves visible and/or seemingly invisible.

Investigating beats, rhythm and silence as measures of time, we will venture through these three days of embodied practices and reflect on cycles of beats in South Asian dance forms, time-defying myths and narratives as viewed through an Afrofuturistic lens, and ask ourselves the question who is allowed to loiter?
 

Facilitators

Amna Mawaz  is a choreographer and dancer from Islamabad, Pakistan, trained in Bharatanatyam by Indu Mitha. She began her training at the age of 11 years under the dance legend Indu Mitha. With an emphasis on Bharatanatyam, she has also learnt and explored Kathak, Uday Shankar and Pakistani folk dances. From 2016 to 2018, Amna was appointed head choreographer and dance instructor of the permanent dance ensemble, the National Performing Arts Group, at the Pakistan National Council of Arts. During this time, she choreographed 3 dance pieces, Barzakh, Situation 101 and Mehergarh with the group ranging from 13 to 22 dancers. In 2016, Amna attended a short course in choreology and choreography from Trinity Laban Conservatoire in Greenwich, England. She has performed and given workshops across Pakistan as well as in China, America, India, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Amna is a part of the Awami Workers Party, founding member of both Women Democratic Front and Laal Hartaal. She is active in and has organized movements for housing rights, and works on the women's movement, environmental issues, students, peasants, transgenders, and persecuted religious and ethnic groups.

Regina LoMío is a dance artist from Havana, Cuba, who has been a freelance dance teacher since the 1990s. Residing now in Berlin, she has relaunched her work in 2018 as a ritual/transcendental dance performer/teacher, event organizer, and self-made gender/sexuality/life-style counselor mostly for queer (LGBTQIA+) and/or ethnic minority people. Regina's dance works revolve around the folkloric and popular afrodescended Cuban dances as well as those dances associated to the contemporary clubbing subculture and music subgenres such as electro, house, and techno. One crucial feature of her dance rites is to reveal the otherwise non-obvious links between these two time/space-wise distant dance cultures. The ultimate aim of her work as a dance ritualist is to positively infuence relevant emotional and psychological states through revisiting and recreating the timelessly spiritual essence of dance.

Venuri Perera  is a choreographer, performance artist, curator and educator from Colombo. A recent graduate of DAS (Arts) Theatre, Amsterdam, she holds an MA in Psychology (Pune University '06), a PostGraduate in Dance In Community (Laban, London '08) and was a member of the Chitrasena Dance Company for 15 years. Since 2017 she has been exploring the power dynamics of gaze, anonymity, sensuality, intimacy and subverting frameworks of ritual through performative experiments in public space, theatres and galleries. Her solo works have dealt with violent nationalism, patriarchy, border rituals, colonial heritage and class. They were shown in festivals and biennales across Europe, South and East Asia and Africa including Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Art Basel, NAF South Africa, Serendipity Goa, Colombo Art Biennale, Colomboscope, SIFA Singapore, TPAM Yokohama, Dhaka Art Summit, Asia Triennial Manchester. Venuri was curator of the programmes of Colombo Dance Platform since 2016, with the support of the Goethe-Institut Colombo. She was a visiting lecturer in the University of Visual and Performing Arts and a member of the Dance Panel of the Arts Council in Sri Lanka (‘18). Attempting to create conditions for compassion and healing in her life and work, failing and learning, she remains curiously optimistic.