Emily Barasch

 is a Los Angeles based interdisciplinary artist working across mediums of choreography, video, and text. She believes that the ways our physical bodies move through the world are reflections of our past encounters and rehearsals for our future encounters. Her work thinks through choreography as constructed ecosystems, wherein the social order is highly prescribed and everybody plays a role. These roles however can be fucked with; slippages, subversion, and refusals can occur. Emily believes the heightened frame and ephemeral container of performance allows us to experiment with alternate ways of being in the world. She creates performances in an attempt to access alternate queer linguistic and temporal possibilities that are not able to be expressed in dominant notions of time, space, and identity. In the words of Jack Halberstam,

 "...we cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming”.

Performance making for her is an attempt to rehearse these future possibilities in real time and space.

 

​Emily has received support and residencies from Atelier Real and Forum Dança in Lisbon, Portugal,  Ponderosa Art Centre in Stolzhagen, Germany, and the PReS Residency in Kassel, Germany. She is the recipient of the James A. Doolittle Award and the Fine Arts Trust Award from UCLA’s department of World Arts and Culture/Dance. Her work has been presented at Highways Performance Space, The Electric Lodge, Highways Performance Space, Eden’s Expressway, BAX, Triskelion Arts, Her work as been presented internationally In Kassel, Germany at the Halle 2, at the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, and at the Stockholm Fringe Festival. Emily holds a BA in Dance and a BA in Sociology from Tulane University and is completing her MFA in Choreography from UCLA’s World Arts and Culture/Dance.​

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Miya Shaffer (Performer and Performance Collaborator)

is a PhD candidate and dancer from Toronto, Canada. Her current research develops and applies an original theorization of a multiracial analytic for dance interpretation. Miya is a 2019 recipient of the Dance Studies Association's Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for graduate student excellence in dance scholarship. Her research is currently supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's Doctoral Fellowship. As a dancer, Miya has performed at L.A. Dance Project, Highways Performance Space, and Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles; Fleck Dance Theatre, Citadel + Compagnie, and Dusk Dances Festival in Toronto; and Théâtre La Chapelle in Montréal. She holds a MA in Culture and Performance from UCLA and a BA in English Literature and World Cinema Studies from McGill University. 

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Sanchita Sharma (Performer and Performance Collaborator)

is a dancer, choreographer, and scholar developing her artistic practice and research between Los Angeles, Austin, and India. She has a Masters in Performance Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi and is currently pursuing her PhD at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Sanchita has been an artist-in-residence at Gati Dance Forum, New Delhi (2016) and at Crashbox, Ruch Mechs in Austin (2020). She has performed extensively across India, Edinburgh, China, Israel, Singapore, Bangkok, New York, and Los Angeles and she recently presented her first dance film, Engage, at Austin Dance Hub’s Virtual Showcase and New Wave Short Film Festival, Munich (Germany) in March 2021. Sanchita is interested in questions around perception, mastery, somatics, touch, and collective agency and she is pursuing them through her research on contemporary dance in India

 

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Anh Vo (Panelist)

is a Vietnamese choreographer, dancer, theorist, and activist. They create dances and produce texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. Currently based in Brooklyn, they earn their degrees in Performance Studies from Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Their artistic process has received support from Brooklyn Arts Council, Women and Performance, New York Live Arts (Fresh Tracks), Leslie-Lohman Museum, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, Tisch/Danspace, and the Performance Project Fellowship at University Settlement. They are the founder and editor of the performance theory blog CultPlastic, the Co-Editor of Critical Correspondence, and a frequent contributor to Anomaly.

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Moriah Evans (Panelist)

is an artist working in and on the form of dance—as artifact, object and culture with its histories, protocols, default production mechanisms, modes of staging and viewing—and the capacity of the public to read dance. Her choreographies navigate utopic and dystopic potentials and tendencies within dance, approached as a fleshy and matriarchal form sliding between minimalism and excess. Evans's received the FCA 2017 Grants to Artists Award Her choreographic work has been commissioned and presented in New York by Danspace Project; MoMA PS1; ISSUE Project Room; Movement Research at Judson Church; and the American Realness festival; in California at CalIT2; as well as internationally at Kampnagel (Hamburg, Germany); Theatre de l'Usine (Geneva, Switzerland); Villa Empain (Brussels, Belgium); and Atelier de Paris Carolyn Carlson (Paris, France).e Project Fellowship at University Settlement.

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estrellx supernova (Panelist)

frames choreography as a process of excavation, as edging and incremental gesture, task as meditation; they activate their work using psychosomatic state werq, Qi energetics, contemporary dance, club dancing, and structures of improvisation. They love getting messy by conjuring choreographic rituals and casting spells within quotidian, natural, subliminal, and imaginary landscapes. Their performances open portals for reclaiming, re-membering, and communing with their ancestral lineage whilst interrogating and shifting patterns of intergenerational trauma. reyes deepens their relationship to their body through somatics, prayer, divination, meditation, writing, and resting. Their choreographic praxis is inseparable from their healing werq and is grounded through these aforementioned practices, through identifying paths of least resistance, and physical patterns of migration [alone, and together]; through persisting on pleasure, surrender, intuition, accountability, generosity, vulnerability, and joy. 

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Isaac Silber (Sound Designer)

is a passionate collaborator, who loves to use his skills in music production, composition and performance to support and enhance artistic projects of all kinds. Isaac is currently a 2nd year PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where he focuses on studying the aesthetics and politics of underground electronic music production and performance in relation to black radical feminist and queer or color critiques of the individual western subject of racial capitalism.

https://www.isaacnsilber.com/

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