What can I do, as a choreographer, to address the multiple crises that we are facing today? What role can dance play in this deeply troubling time? I attempt to find answers to these questions through my works. For me, movement refers to the body’s ability to move, take action, and have agency to create change.

I work with applied choreography, using it as a tool to interrogate and re-organise the social and political body in time and space. In particular, my interest lies in activating the potential within the marginalised body to resist and disrupt hegemonic structures, using strategies of decolonisation, vulnerability, care, queerness and failure. My works are interactive and collaborative in design, and usually take the form of artistic research, collaborative performances, choreographic interventions and intimate encounters. My practice is inspired by the Buddhist concept of interdependence and care, Judith Butler’s resistance in vulnerability, Jack Halberstam’s queer art of failure, Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed and Nicolas Bourriaud’s micro-utopias.

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
“If I can’t revolt, I don’t want to be part of your dance.” TANK MAN DANCE is inspired by the unidentified man who blocked a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 5th, 1989, the day after the crackdown on the student protests.

I created this work out of a desire to use dance as a tool of resistance. By playfully turning the Tank Man’s movement into a dance video tutorial, I hope to highlight the potential that lies within ordinary persons to initiate change and disrupt the machines of violence and oppression. It is a call-out to stand up against injustice, no matter how insignificant we think we are, how insurmountable the task is or how elusive liberation seems. Each of us has the power to stop our own personal “tanks”. In an age of polycrisis where it is easier to give in to despair and desperation, “TANK MAN DANCE” is a reminder not to give up hope and a tribute to all “Tank Persons” past, present and future.

Director of Photography: Jonathan Florez, with support from Fonds Darstellende Künste

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
We are living in a high-functioning, fast-paced, result-oriented capitalistic system that is designed to exhaust and separate us. With the prize money, I would like to create a participatory digital project that invites people from all over the world to dance spontaneously together. My wish is to use dance to disrupt this system, by creating unexpected pockets of joy and togetherness. It is operated through a mobile app, which sends out a “dance alarm” at random points of the day, asking people to stop whatever they are doing and dance to a music/song. People from different countries can take part. They are also given the choice to turn on their cameras, which display them on a screen, dancing together with people from all over the world. So for a brief moment, we are connected. I hope that the work can remind us to come together and resist with joy and silliness, in spite of the forces that try to divide us.

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