Four exciting international artists curate the 2022 programme from across the Commonwealth territories including practices of indigenous artists from Canada and Australia. Each artist will curate a series of screendance films representing their culture and looking at questions on the duality of identity through a postcolonial lens.
This programme will be available online during the festival 17 June – 3 July 2022 and screened at various festival sites.
Olivia C.Davies (Canada)
Olivia C. Davies is a Canadian Contemporary Indigenous dance artist who creates and collaborates across multiple platforms including choreography, curation, conversation, film, and sound design to share stories that open new ways to experience the world. Davies’ body of work spans three decades with creations and collaborations that explore the emotional and political relationships between people and places, often investigating the body’s dynamic ability to transmit narrative, blood memory, and a neo-traditional Indigenous perspective. In 2018, she founded O.Dela Artsand Matriarchs Uprising Festival. She honours her mixed-blood ancestry as an Algonquin Anishinaabe-KwewithFrench-Canadian, Finnish and Welsh heritage.
Gregory Maqoma (South Africa)
Gregory Vuyani Maqoma became interested in dance in the late 1980s as a means to escape the growing political tensions growing in Soweto, South Africa, where he was born. He started his formal dance training in 1990 at Moving into Dance, where he, later, became the Associate Artistic Director in 2002. He founded Vuyani Dance Theatre (VDT) in 1999 while undertaking a scholarship at the Performing Arts Research and Training School (PARTS) in Belgium, under the direction of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. Maqoma has established himself as an internationally renowned dancer, choreographer, teacher, and director.
Jacob Boehme (Australia)
Jacob Boehme is a Melbourne born and raised artist of the Narangga and Kaurna Nations, South Australia. A multi-disciplinary theatre maker and choreographer, creating work for the stage, screen, large-scale public events and festivals.. Jacob is also Director, First Nations Programs at Carriageworks, Australia’s largest multi-arts centre. For contemporary and experimental arts.
Sumedha Bhattacharyya (India)
Sumedha is an interdisciplinary dance artist, choreographer, educator and primary caregiver. Her practice experiments with camera, tradition and gender, focusing on screen-dance film-making. She is curious about what happens at the intersections of performance and technology and digital interactivity in performance making and staging.
YOU MAY ALSO BE INTERESTED IN…
Watch curators Gregory Maqoma and Olivia C.Davies on the CommonTalk Digital panel, discussing what influence the UK’s colonialist history has had on their identity, practice, and artistry.
