Presenters & Performers – Critical Dance Experiments

CDE Presenters

Our 2026 Critical Dance Experiments Presenters and Performers. Click on the name to read the presenter(s)/performer(s) abstracts and bios.

It is Good to Have Presentations That Begin with a Powwow and End with a Dreaming Coyote: Trickster Tales on the Margins of the Academy

Robin Raven Prichard

Abstract: This presentation uses storytelling as a method to talk about dancing and storytelling as Indigenous methods and decolonial interventions. As both stories and dance were systematically oppressed as a method of colonization, re-storying and dancing are crucial acts of decolonization and Indigenous resurgence. These stories reveal that performance scholarship will need to develop the capacity for three elements in order to be capable of embracing Indigenous methods and perspectives: humility, creativity, and kinetic ontologies/cosmologies/epistemologies lifeways. These stories begin more than seven generations ago, and they end more than seven generations in the future. And they are told by a multiplicity of voices, including me, the human who gets the authorship credit, as well as Raven and Coyote, who should also get credit but almost never do.
This presentation is a work of Three-Eyed Seeing. One eye is my very flawed human perspective. One eye is Coyote’s, who is always present but rarely seen, and that gives her a special perspective. She sees things at ground level, including the shimmers that humans don’t. The third eye is Raven’s, who, from her ability to fly at any altitude, sees much more than anyone. Raven can fly in any direction, including backwards and through death; this makes her the wisest of all, but it also makes her insufferable. Our multivocal storytelling disrupts hegemonic, human-centered ways of perceiving the world by including multiple, non-human viewpoints as works of critical fabulations. These perspectives intervene in normative scholarship to reveal co-existing alternatives and multiple Otherwises.
Keywords: Indigenous methods, Indigenous dance, critical fabulations, Otherwise, kinetic lifeways
Bio: Robin Raven Prichard spends her days as a graduate student (Ohio State University) and faculty member (University of Akron), and her nights trying to recover her soul. As a person of disrupted Indigenous and settler ancestry, she attends powwows as often as she can and writes about them occasionally. Her writings about powwows and Indigenous dance histories can be found in higher education textbooks, Journal of Dance Education, Dance Education in Practice, and the edited volume “Why Men (Don’t) Dance.”

Drowning in Artificial Stupidity: The Inclusion of Water as a Metric for Future Generations of Technological Development

Jorge P. Yanez (Angel)

Abstract: This essay stages a confrontation between current forms of artificial intelligence and ancestral ceremonial practices. Through a neo-materialist examination of computers’ composition and its evident incompatibility with organic life on Earth, I introduce water as a new metric to measure different forms of intelligence, be they computational or ancestral. Drawing from Indigenous ritual, Black queer theory, dance and media studies, I here intend to liberate techné —the engine of technology- from its insulated stasis in the form of commodities and gadgets that rely on petroculture’s holy grail: plastics. Once reconnected to its superfluidity, technology can start following the Black Queer and Trans imperative of “Giving Life” only when its composition is materialized through biodegradable forms that are compatible with water. This piece is part of a broader inquiry into the spiritual and corporeal aspects of technology that are rarely foregrounded. It starts with the account of a Yaqui ceremony to then operationalize a corporeally centered analysis that unfolds the transhuman futures already latent in ancestral practices.
Bio: Jorge Poveda Yánez is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar with formal training in the performing arts, social sciences, anthropology and the law. As a Fulbright scholar, he became a teaching assistant and doctoral fellow at the University of California, Riverside, where he currently works. Jorge uses a combination of performance, drag, and theoretical research to explore the artistic, biological, and environmental implications of the integration of the dancing body with different kinds of technologies. These investigations entangle his participation in queer Ballroom and in ceremonial contexts with the Yaqui nation. Jorge’s recent mixed-media performances include “BIOKINEME2”, “Forgotten Science”, and “A Queer Reggaeton Dance for the End of Our Times” presented across the US, Belgium, and France. Some of his written publications include “From Humans That Move Like Machines to Machines That Move Like Humans” (Dance and Movement Research Journal), “Drowning in Dance Data” (DOCUMENTA Journal), and “Dancing Someone Else’s Dance Through Someone Else’s Body” (Dance Articulated Journal). The guiding keywords spearheading his current projects are: computation, metabolization, reverence, and pleasure.

Performative Labor Heritage in the City of Plantation

Lisistrata Lusandiana

Abstract: The topic I want to discuss at this conference focuses on the way the community of plantation laborers takes part in heritage-making practices by initiating festivals, art performances, and sustaining folklore and horror stories. The existence of these expressions cannot be separated from the relations of the community with the material debris of the tobacco plantation in their neighborhood, and with some monumentalization that occurs in that area. Borrowing from relational aesthetics that center relationality between human and non-human entities, such as material debris and other things, this paper is an effort to reveal the personhood of material culture in the area. Besides showing the agency of the local people and the personhood that emerges out of this context, this paper is a fragment that explores power arising from the lived experiences of the people amid the context of the creative industry and the imperial heritage regime in North Sumatra, Indonesia.
keywords: critical heritage studies, embodied remembrance, imperial plantation
Bio: Lisistrata Lusandiana is a Ph.D. student in the Anthropology department at UC Riverside. She is a Fellow of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program. She graduated with B.A. in English Letters from Universitas Sanata Dharma, Indonesia and M.A. in Cultural Studies from the same university. She has worked in an interdisciplinary cultural scene, in the gallery, library, archive institution and museum (glam), as a researcher, producer and festival director. Her research interests revolve around critical heritage studies, relational aesthetics, tourism, remembrance, decolonizing methodologies.

Putting the Body on/off the Line: A Dance (Jam) Improvisation (Lab)

Fabiola Ochoa Torralba

This workshop session offers an opportunity to engage with a variety of texts that approach theories of the flesh through a structured improvisational movement practice.
Bio: Fabiola Ochoa Torralba (they/she) is a formerly undocumented (im)migrant and movement artist who approaches dance through the lens of cultural work, grassroots political organizing, and spiritual activism. They were born in Acapulco, Guerrero (Mexico), and primarily raised in the Edgewood District on the Westside of San Antonio, Texas (U.S.A.)—known as Yanaguana to the Payaya band of the Coahuiltecan Nation and the Estok Gna tribe of the Carrizo Comecrudo, among others. They share their passion for embodied learning across diverse spaces, sectors, and communities through multidisciplinary approaches rooted in social justice values, including dance, performance, and scholarly engagement. As a graduate student in the Critical Dance Studies program at the University of California, Riverside, their research centers Afro-Mexican dance, with a particular focus on Mexico’s Costa Chica region.

Utopic Residue: Bausch, Bloch, and the Affordance of Dirt

Hannah Grissom

Abstract: What are the affordances of dirt? More precisely, what could dirt afford if it were made weightless, mobile, and fragmentary? In this presentation, we will read Ernst Bloch’s conception of the ornament through Pina Bausch’s 1975 iteration of The Rite of Spring, where dancers violently mobilize the layer of dirt that coats the stage. We will wager that the very dirt that comes to rest on the sweating skin of the dancers renders visible Bloch’s notion of the ornament. Not only does it render ornament sensible— as a site for utopia—it gives back to the ornament. It allows it to be borne. Utopia then comes to rest next to Italo Calvino’s argument for lightness from his Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Lightness: a quality of utmost interest to the ornament in that the utopia it renders is difficult, heavy, and exhausting because it can never be reached, known, only anticipated and hoped for.
Abstract: Keywords: Pina Bausch, Ernst Bloch, Utopia, Ornament
Bio: Hannah Grissom is a second-year doctoral student in the department of Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She received a BA in Art History, French, and Studio Art from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, in 2023. She is currently working on her qualifying Master’s thesis on Hans Bellmer and Georges Bataille’s clandestine joint project, the 1947 publication of Story of the Eye.

Standardizing Clay Bodies

em irvin

Abstract: At Laguna Clay Company in Southern, California, a board of slip-cast baby doll faces helps ceramicists decide which casting slip to purchase. The faces are arranged from the whitest to the darkest clay body. Each face is labeled—Frost White, Sahara, Coffee—displaying difference as color while repeating sameness in form. em irvin shows how the lessons of American Studio Ceramics (ASC) take form on this board and how methods for making with clay have been standardized into compulsory practices of making and knowing. The test tile board materializes ASC’s inherited ideals of purity, perfection, and refinement, extending Enlightenment and eugenic investments in plasticity and fungibility into contemporary ceramic pedagogy. By tracing the material operations of plaster, slip, water and deflocculant, irvin reveals how clay is disciplined to conform to measured relations that echo the hierarchical distributions of value historically imposed on bodies. Yet within these same infrastructures, irvin locates the potential of the clump, or particles that gather and settle at the bottom of the slip bucket. These clay collectives resist standardization, forming sticky, unpredictable relations that model another way of being in touch, one that clings toward solidarity rather than separation.
Bio: em irvin (they/them) works with(out) clay and ceramic materials as a performer. They hold an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Colorado Boulder and are a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California, Davis.

Vital Reason and the Grammar of Flesh: Reorienting Philosophy Through an Embodied Approach

Gustavo Garcia

Abstract: A dominant “scientistic” tendency in contemporary philosophy, characterized by Bernard Williams and Richard Rorty, prioritizes abstract concepts over the fluidity of lived experience. Rooted in distrust of the subjective body, this perspective views the “flesh” as an impediment to objectivity, driving the field toward detached logical rigor. While theoretical analysis possesses value, the aspiration for an “absolute conception” often aims to transcend the thinker’s specific history. This methodological abstraction risks reducing philosophy to an impersonal exercise, detached from the urgent reality of our collective life. Responding to the call to attend to the “flesh,” I argue that philosophy benefits from an embodied approach. Engaging Hortense Spillers’ concept of flesh alongside Miguel de Unamuno’s “man of flesh and bone” and José Ortega y Gasset’s “historical reason,” I propose reorienting toward the concrete. For Unamuno, ignoring the affective body “kills” life by freezing it into rigid categories. Similarly, Ortega posits life as a “drama” rooted in a specific generation. Adopting this approach allows philosophy to move beyond “physico-mathematical” models to recognize flesh as a source of historical meaning, recovering the thinker’s “inner biography.” This synthesis reveals a critical temporal dynamic: if the past’s “grammar” constitutes our present flesh, our present enactment of life actively constitutes the future’s grammar. This recognition raises the stakes, demanding we confront the tensions of our shared national existence without positing philosophy as a solitary savior. An embodied approach compels the field to abandon static models for a “vital reason” responsive to the history we are bringing about.
Keywords: vital reason, embodied philosophy, the flesh
Bio: Gustavo Garcia is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Riverside, and an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Santa Monica College. A first-generation scholar from South Los Angeles, his research specializes in Spanish and Mexican philosophy, focusing specifically on José Ortega y Gasset’s “Vital Reason.” Gustavo adopts this concept methodologically, arguing that philosophy is a dynamic engagement with lived history rather than a detached abstraction. His work traces the intellectual lineage of the “Madrid School” through Spanish Civil War exiles, particularly José Gaos, who influenced the existential analysis of lo mexicano. Gustavo is equally dedicated to demystifying academia for non-traditional students. He has mentored scholars through TRIO and McNair programs and, at Santa Monica College, prioritizes dialogue outside the classroom. He views this pedagogy as an extension of his philosophical commitment to life and circumstance. He expects to graduate in Spring 2026.

“Performance, Play and Improvisation: an artivist/performance activist tool kit”

Cinthia Duran Larrea

Workshop: Part of the work of a performance activist and movement artivist is to create/facilitate through and with her body -and the bodies of those who she shares the space with- the radical imaginations of a world that looks and feels different than the one we currently know and participate in. In other words, the work of a movement artivist is to create, through embodiment, what does not yet exist.
This workshop intends to share with participants three of the tools I have encountered and developed as an artivist: play, performance and improvisation. These practices are powerful entry points into creative embodied states where the unexpected and unknown can emerge. Where the vision and hopes for justice, wholeness, wellbeing, and many other collective longings can become a felt embodied experience that opens up possibilities for individuals and communities. Play, Improvisation and Performance are practices where we can rehearse different ways of being in the world and share space with one another, which offers a generative simultaneity of disruptive and constructive potential. My intention is to invite participants to experience these creative states and to explore ways of building an environment/ space conducive to engage in these vulnerable yet powerful practices.
Key words: play, improvisation, development, activism, performance
Bio: Cinthia Duran is an Ecuadorian dance scholar, latin social dancer, movement artivist and performance activist following the legacy of the East Side Institute for Social Therapeutics and Performance Activism based in New york City. She earned her MA in anthropology of Dance at the Choreomundus Consortium in France, Hungary, Norway and England, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California Riverside. Her current research focuses on Latin Social Dances as resource-sharing and resource-building latinx technologies, that carry the potential of advancing local social justice agendas. Cinthia currently works at UCR as a Teaching Assistant and as a Gluck Program of the Arts Fellow. In line with her vision as a scholar, her pedagogy activates dance, improvisation and performance as tools to offer individuals the possibility to perform who they want to become and improvise their way into the futures they envision for themselves and their communities.

Not seen, Not heard: The Erasure of MENA women in the Global belly dance community

Tiara “Tia” Smith

Abstract (Panel): Where Are All the MENA Belly Dancers?Despite belly dance originating in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), MENA dancers are often underrepresented in international festival scenes—and, in some cases, within their own countries. This panel explores the historical, political, and social reasons behind this absence, examining how colonialism, Orientalism, migration, respectability politics, and advocacy, who is platformed, and who is silenced within global belly dance spaces. Through the perspectives of MENA and diasporic practitioners, therapists, and educators, the panel will address how belly dance functions as cultural practice and resistance. We will discuss how non-native teachers’ and dancers attitudes, pedagogies, and positions of authority impact MENA female-identifying dancers, particularly regarding authenticity, ownership, and access to professional opportunities. The conversation will also explore how reclaiming belly dance can serve as an act of cultural survival, identity reclamation, and embodied resistance.
By centering lived experiences from within the culture, this panel invites a critical rethinking of representation, power, and responsibility in the global belly dance community. Participants will be encouraged to reflect on how festivals, studios, and educators can move toward more ethical, inclusive, and culturally grounded practices that honor the dance’s roots and the people from whom it comes.
Bio: Tia is an award-winning belly dancer whose artistry bridges tradition and contemporary storytelling. Trained in ballet, jazz, modern, Oceania dance, and Egyptian belly dance, she blends strong technique with musicality and cultural respect. A proud UCR alumna, she earned her Bachelor of Arts in Dance with an emphasis in dance making in 2025, developing a choreographic voice centered on community, agency, and joy. She is currently pursuing a master’s in Dance Education at Point Park University, deepening her pedagogy and commitment to empowering diverse learners in the studio and classroom. Recognized for her creative leadership, Tiara was selected as a Gluck Fellow in both 2024 and 2025, bringing high-quality arts programming to schools and community spaces. Onstage, in rehearsal, and as an educator, she aims to create spaces where audiences and students feel seen, inspired, and invited to move. Her work celebrates heritage, collaboration, curiosity, and lifelong learning everywhere.

Unnoticed Strand

Na an & Negar kamali

Performance: “What did your hair look like when you were eleven? When did you start losing it?” Sitting face-to-face, we ask each other these questions, and they become a kind of time capsule—an entry point into an embodied exploration of hair. We were born in the same year, one in China and the other in Iran, and met years later in the United States as immigrants navigating the complexities of fully expressing ourselves. Like identity, hair traces our existence across past, present, and future. It falls, regrows, transforms—constantly reshaped by experience, history, and context. We are drawn to this often “unnoticed” movement because it quietly shapes our lives while carrying us toward transformation: a new chapter or the slow unfolding of age. This work explores the sensations of “falling” and “rising”—like hair, like when we were both eleven in China and Iran, and like the way we long for space to imagine the future. keywords: unnoticed, falling and rising
Bios: Negar Kamali is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer whose work investigates the relationship between space, movement, and cultural memory. Trained in architecture, she applies spatial analysis to choreographic practice, examining how built environments shape bodily knowledge and social relations. Since 2011, she has taught Persianate and Iranian dance as well as contemporary dance, and her extensive travels across Iran have profoundly shaped her creative practice. Her choreography draws on the country’s diverse geography and rich literary heritage. Currently pursuing an MFA in Experimental Choreography at the University of California, Riverside, Negar’s research asks: What do we carry when we move? Her methodology employs objects as live collaborators and draws on the Persian concept of Shuridegi a passionate transformation born from deep longing. Her work engages sensation as knowledge and acknowledges temporality’s imprint on movement, demonstrating how relocation across geographies shapes embodied understanding, and how movement itself becomes a living archive.
Na An is a dance artist and scholar pursuing a PhD in Critical Dance Studies at UCR. Her choreographic practice explores memory, sensation, social gender, and the immigrant experience. Her work has been presented in Los Angeles, New York, Melbourne, and Beijing, and she was an Artist-in-Residence at Chez Bushwick in New York in 2022. Her dance film Room 264 has screened at international festivals in Australia, Chile, Hong Kong, Greece, Estonia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and received the Audience Choice Award at the 2019 Melbourne Women in Film Festival. As a scholar, she researches choreography, technique and training, dance dramaturgy, and contemporary dance in China. Her article on dance dramaturgy is forthcoming with Routledge. She holds an MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College, an MA in Dramaturgy from the University of Melbourne, and a BA in Modern Dance Choreography from the Beijing Dance Academy.

gestures of resistance

Maryam Malmir

Performance: this work refers to the issue of manipulated femininity in a power system and patriarchal society, which imposes artificial boundaries on women’s bodies. The choreography follows a numerical system. Inspired by the historical photographs of women in a highly restricted and patriarchal dynasty in Iran, (Qajar 1789–1925), and comparing this archive with contemporary and photoshoot postures of women, also mathematical systems, the choreography methodology creates a situation for two female bodies, challenging their balance to reproduce historical photography gestures based on the number of contact points between their body and the ground. this work is inspired by the photography archive of women from Qajar era in Iran, and connects feminine gestures before the camera to notions of balance and identity.
Keywords: gesture, photography archive, feminism
Bio: Maryam Malmir is a Contemporary Dancer and Choreographer from Iran. her works are mostly conceptual and due to her background in Mathematics she uses Mathematical patterns as her choreographic language to convey meanings. She is an active member of ISPA, International Society for the Performing Arts in New York City since 2020 and IETM, International Network of Contemporary Performing Arts in Europe since 2023. She is currently pursuing her graduate studies in Experimental Choreography at the University of California Riverside. Her distinguished awards in the field of performing arts are: ATSA, Arthink South Asia fellowship (India 2019, 2020) ISPA, International Society for the Performing Arts, global fellowship (New York 2020,2021 and 2022) IETM, International network of contemporary performing arts, Global Connectors (Denmark 2023) GCRP, Global Cultural Relations Program, global fellowship (European Union 2022) IN EX (IL) Lab program (Cyprus, European Union 2023, 2024) Internationale tanzmesse, NRW professional visitors program (Germany 2024)

From Ritual to Stage: A Woman’s journey through Sri Lankan Dance

Sandani Sulochani

Performance:This proposed live performance stages the historical transformation of Sri Lanka’s Kandyan dance from an Indigenous ritual of spirit healing into a nationalized theatrical form. Performed by a Kandyan dancer in dialogue with a live drummer and singer, the work draws from the Kohomba Kankariya, a night-long exorcism ritual in which dance, percussion, and poetry function as technologies of embodied healing and communal repair. The performance unfolds as a choreographic historiography, moving through rhythmic invocation, ritual practice, moments of colonial encounter, theatrical codification, and feminist intervention to trace how a form once rooted in male ritual specialists was transformed through the labor of women dancers and broader sociopolitical tensions. Through a combination of archival footage and mixed-repertoire sequences, the piece reveals how choreography operates not only as an aesthetic form but also as a site where race, gender, spirituality, imperialism, and nationalism are negotiated and inscribed on the dancing body. Projected archival imagery and live vocal recitation mediate between past and present, activating the body as a living archive that resists erasure by reenacting what has been historically disembodied by colonial and nationalist visual regimes. The performance asks what kinds of healing epistemologies live in ritualized bodies, what is lost and gained when sacred movement is translated into theatrical spectacle, and how Kandyan dance might integrate narrative storytelling into its traditionally abstract movement vocabulary. By centering a globally under-recognized South Asian dance lineage, this performance contributes to decolonial, feminist, and corporeal approaches to dance as worldmaking.
Keywords: Sri Lanka; Ritual; Kandyan Dance; History
Bio: Sandani Sulochani and Waruna Hemachandra are a Sri Lankan dance and drumming duo specializing in the island’s three classical forms: Kandyan, Low-Country, and Sabaragamuwa. Former senior members of Sri Lanka’s acclaimed Chitrasena Dance Company (CDC), the institution credited with bringing ritual dance to the modern stage in the 1940s, they toured internationally with its productions. Sandani has performed all three forms since childhood and holds a Master’s degree in Dance from the University of Kelaniya, where her thesis examined how Vajira Chitrasena, Sri Lanka’s first professional female dancer, choreographically and pedagogically transformed Kandyan dance for the stage. She has taught at the University of Kelaniya, Ladies’ College Colombo, and the CDC. Waruna, a hereditary Kandyan drummer, has performed since childhood and is the founder of Dinaadah, a premier Sri Lankan drum ensemble. After moving to the US in 2022, they founded SandaWaruna Art of Dance, an LA-based performing arts company and school dedicated to bringing a critical practice of Sri Lankan dance to the diaspora. www.sandawarunadance.com.

S-spiraled Metamorphosis: Embodiment, Archive, and Odissi

Sriradha Paul

Performance: This performance engages Odissi’s cyclical movement vocabularies, particularly the fluid torso and S-curved body, as embodied metaphors for the historical transformations that have shaped the form’s emergence as “classical.” It reflects on the silencing of Mahari practitioners, the selective historiographic invocation of Gotipua practices as genealogical reference, and the consolidation of Odissi under predominantly male gurus who formalized pedagogy, aesthetics, and costume. While these processes enabled Odissi’s institutional recognition, they also produced exclusions through Brahminization and canon formation. Situating embodiment as a critical archive, this project interrogates how Brahminization and genealogical erasure are negotiated, resisted, and rearticulated through dancing bodies, particularly those situated outside dominant caste and lineage-based structures.
Bio: Sriradha Paul is a second-year PhD graduate student in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside, as well as an Odissi dancer, researcher, and scholar. Her research focuses on Odissi dance pedagogy and structural biases within South Asian transmission models, centering the form’s aesthetic, cultural, and religious dimensions, with particular attention to embodied memory, mentorship, and community-based knowledge transmission. Trained in Kolkata and through years of rigorous practice in Bhubaneswar, her artistic formation has been shaped by over twenty-five years rooted in communal learning within and beyond the guru-shishya tradition. An Erasmus Mundus Fellow (2019–2021) with a master’s degree in Dance Anthropology, Sriradha adopts an interdisciplinary approach that integrates ethnography, embodied research, and performance-making. Her work has been recognized through multiple honors, including the U.S. Federal Assistance Award, Indo-Pacific Grant, and Gluck Fellowship. An empaneled SPICMACAY artist, she has performed and taught internationally, engaging critically with questions of access, pedagogy, and narrative construction in classical Indian dance.

Archiving the Liminal: Embodied Memory and the Absent Presence of Women in Yakshagana (Hybrid)

Pannaga Jois

Abstract: This paper is an exploration of how the absent presence of women in Yakshagana, a traditional theatre form from Southern India exclusively performed by ‘men’, can be recovered through embodied memory and liminal imagery. Drawing on theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Ann Stoler, Tina Campt, et al, I argue that the off-stage, transitional moments of performance, those in-between spaces where the performer is neither fully character nor fully self, constitute a counter-archive: one that preserves the affective, sensorial, and material traces of women whose participation has historically been denied and idealised by the dominant, patriarchal framing of Yakshagana as ‘male-form’. By drawing on methodologies from performance and dance studies, and situating them within South Asian studies, this paper seeks to generate a conversation around the embodied memories of those excluded from the historical record, memories that were never documented or lacked the means to be.
By attending to these liminal spaces, what I call the “not-yet-ness” of embodiment, I trace how gender is not only performed on stage but constructed, negotiated, and contested in the preparatory and residual gestures surrounding the performance event. These moments, though peripheral to the spectacle, carry significant epistemological weight: they show how gendered presence is actively fabricated and how absence becomes a site of critical inquiry. Off-stage, transitional gestures in Yakshagana thus function as a repertoire of embodied memories, revealing the suppressed presence of women and gender nonconformity in a form otherwise framed as exclusively male. This repertoire is shaped long before performers enter the stage; in donning these costumes, young girls learn not simply to wear a garment but to internalize a mode of femininity and chastity as prescribed by Hindu Brahmanical ideology.
Bio: Pannaga Jois is a researcher and theatre/performance maker from India, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies at the Department of Dance, University of California, Riverside. Her research investigates the intersections of ethnography, archival studies, gender studies, and dance/performance analysis in relation to Yakshagana, a traditional art form of southern India. Her artistic practice spans devised theatre, performance installations, choreography and scenographic explorations. She received her MA in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU with an aid of TSOA Graduate Scholarship Award, 2022. She holds an MA in Performance Making from Goldsmiths, University of London. She was the recipient of Charles Wallace India Trust scholarship in 2016-17 and previously a fellow under Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India/National School of Drama. She was also a national scholar from Karnataka in the year 2013 to study at the National School of Drama, New Delhi from where she graduated in 2015.

Manufacturing Masculinity: How Femmephobia Regulates Male Dancer Privilege in Belly Dance

Drake von Trapp

Abstract: Drawing from men’s studies, dance and performance studies, and postcolonial critique, this paper examines how male belly dancers navigate the paradox of femmephobia and “male dancer privilege,” using the career of John Compton as a case study. Using qualitative interviews, video and movement analysis, and literary analysis, I demonstrate that John’s hypermasculine stylization illuminates how masculinity can be used both as protection and harm—a prophylactic measure against heterosexism, and an insidious instrument of coloniality. Per Andre Rivera, “male dancer privilege” observes that male dancers receive a disproportionate amount of praise, professional opportunity, and reputational gain compared to their skill. This is where men in belly dance elucidate a regulatory mechanism presently under-theorised in discourses on men in feminine dance forms: in belly dance, male dancer privilege only confers under paradoxical conditions regulated by femmephobia, the devaluation of femininity. Belly dance, a form characterized by its embodied femininity, has no gender-segregated movement canon, and men’s participation is often legitimated based on their distance from femininity, which I argue damages the integrity of the form itself. These conditions lead many men to foreground hypermasculinity to retain their male dancer privilege. In doing so, I submit that John’s manufactured de-feminization reveals how hypermasculinity perpetuates coloniality by superimposing Westernized masculinity onto a feminine non-Western dance tradition. I conclude by defending that male belly dancers’ embodied femininity does not devalue men’s masculinity, but exposes how the disciplining structure of femmephobia reproduces conditions under which masculinity must be policed and defensively reasserted.
Keywords: masculinity, femmephobia, belly dance
Bio: Drake von Trapp is a second-year PhD student in the Performance as Public Practice program at the University of Texas at Austin, and a professional belly dance performer, choreographer, master teacher, and scholar. He holds a BA and MA in Dance and a postgraduate certificate in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies from Texas Woman’s University. His master’s thesis on the male belly dancer John Compton informs his ongoing dissertation research on men in belly dance, femmephobia, embodied citation, movement lineage, and the politics of entertainment. His work examines how gendered embodiment and subcultural membership shape the archivization and historical transmission of American belly dance. He recently published a book review in Dance Chronicle, “Something New in an Old Way: Cairene Belly Dance Ethnography and the Politics of Entertainment,” and works as an internationally touring artist, headlining, performing, and presenting his research at major international belly dance conferences.

Performing Shringara: Love and Myth-Making in Bharatanatyam

Preethi Ramaprasad

Abstract: This paper addresses the trend of transnational Bharatanatyam dancers increasingly performing the erotic, known as shringara, in Bharatanatyam (South Indian dance), often citing a reclamation of feminist- related values. Some of the compositions used in Bharatanatyam dance repertoires include remnants of hereditary dancers’ past, which once incorrectly labelled them as prostitutes, and invisibilized their labor and contributions to the field of dance. Some examples are Jayadeva’s Gita Govindam, Kshetrayya Padamulu, and Muddupalani’s Radhika Santvanamu. While there are other collections, I selected these because they have a common male figure, the Hindu god Krishna, as the object of the female protagonist’s affection. In this paper, I interrogate my own practice of Bharatanatyam alongside two other videos depicting shringara including a performance by hereditary dancer Yashoda Thakore in the Kalavantulu tradition. Dr. Anusha Kedhar delineates ways that Bharatanatyam dancers embodying shringara can “destabilize gender hierarchies,” while simultaneously reinscribing them (2025, 36). Dr. Harshita Kamath complicates common perceptions of authorship in these courtesan hereditary dance compositions, challenging interpretations of erotic poetry performed by Bharatanatyam dancers today (2019). I add to Kedhar and Kamath’s analyses by proposing that two frameworks arise as dancers perform the erotic: first, the presence of the Hindu god as a mythical object of affection and second, the mythical history of the courtesan figure. Both aspects of Bharatanatyam impact the way that dancers perform shringara. I ask, with Bharatanatyam emerging from an appropriated fraught history, how does myth impact the choreography of intimacy as it relates to the diaspora?
Keywords: Bharatanatyam, transnational, myth, diaspora, shringara
Bio: Preethi Ramaprasad is a dancer, curator, musician, and researcher. Her journey teaching and performing Bharatanatyam has led to artistic community-building endeavors across India, Europe, and the United States. She co-runs When Eyes Speak Choreography Festival, The Varnam Salon, and Performing Voices of Bhakti which aim to create safe spaces to share South Asian expression in the diaspora. Ramaprasad has a doctorate in Critical Dance Studies from UC Riverside where her dissertation focused on representation and the performance of myth among transnational Bharatanatyam practitioners. Ramaprasad’s work has been funded by and earned accolades through the San Francisco Arts Commission and SF Public Library Residency, American Society for Theater Research, Gluck Fellows Program, Zellerbach Family Foundation, American Conservatory Theater ArtShare Program, Deborah Slater Dance Theater, SAFEhouse Arts Lead Resident Fellowship, and the All-Rounder Yuva Kala Bharati for Young Artists. More at preethiramaprasad.com.

Drishti Kavya: Visual Poetics and Politics of Dance Film

Gunindu Abeysekera; Mihika Banerjee

Abstract: This collaborative paper examines how racialized, gendered, and national identities are contested and (re)produced through dance practices and film documentations of South Asia. Based on Drishti Kavya (visual poetry), our own experimental and reflexive dance film that stages the encounter between an Indian Odissi dancer and a Sri Lankan dance filmmaker, this project interrogates the labor, power, and ethics of documenting dance. Engaging with Jean Baudrillard (1981) and Peggy Phelan’s (1993) provocations on the ontology of performance, this project asks what is both activated and displaced when embodied practice is translated into simulacra. By destabilizing documentation as mere record-keeping, this work foregrounds both the dancing and the filming bodies as co-performers, revealing that filmed dance is an epistemic site of choreography, authorship, and meaning-making. Formally, the dance film depicts a choreographic interaction between the performers through mirrored gestures, match cuts, and voice-over, revealing the creative choices and ideological tensions of documenting “South Asian” bodies. Conceptually, the project engages discourses on performance, postcolonialism, and nationalism in South Asia to contest the significance of homeland, heritage, and (disruptive) histories. The paper situates the film within theories of the body as archive and counter-archive, reading the dancing and filming bodies as sites where racialized surveillance, diasporic longing, and nationalist attachments to “origin” are negotiated, challenged, and reimagined. Together, the paper and film propose a critical dance experiment that centers bodies in performance as a locus of both compliance and refusal by choreographing counter-memories and renewed associations with national imaginings.
Bio: Gunindu “Guni” Abeysekera and Mihika Banerjee are currently doctoral candidates in Culture and Performance at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Guni is a Sri Lankan-American scholar, photo-video artist, and community archivist. His doctoral research offers a comparative analysis of British colonial and Sri Lankan national filmic representations of Kandyan dance, investigating how imperial and nationalist ideologies are constructed and disseminated through visual media and performance. Mihika, raised in Kolkata, India, is an Odissi dancer who has performed widely in India, Thailand, China, and the US. Mihika’s doctoral research examines dance festivals at World Heritage Sites, as choreographic projects of nation-making in postcolonial India. As cohort members, they have been collaborating on media and dance projects, drawing on their expertise and research to examine South Asian aesthetics, politics, and creative possibilities in transnational and diasporic contexts. They have co-presented at colloquia, conferences, and lecture-demonstrations at UCLA and LMU.

Choreographies of Trans Formalism

Wesleigh Gates

Abstract: Whether hostile or “affirming,” most discourses on trans life are invested in a shared project of assigning meaning (and thus, value) to trans bodies. How do we build modes of thought that are invested in our thriving yet do not add to this project of valuation and capture? To attempt just that, in this talk I bring the “radical formalism” of aesthetic theorist Eugenie Brinkema to bear on our understanding of trans embodiment. Following Brinkema, I consider a body as a site where form meets flesh, and discuss the ethical implications of this reading. For instance, to assert that “trans” exists as/in particular corporeal formal configurations is necessarily to raise the question of the conditions that do or do not allow those forms to take shape. The matter of how “trans” slides in and out of form highlights systems and procedures, techniques and assemblages, as they bear on particular bodies. And since it is our bodies—what they do, where they go, how they make and remake themselves—and not our “identities” that are being most fundamentally targeted, the stakes of developing a corporeal trans politics are high. Putting Brinkema’s formalist program in conversation with the notion of choreography — which I frame here as the emergence and dissolution of form across time and space —I call for those of us invested in the thriving of trans lifeworlds to leave behind our obsession with discourse and turn our attention to the matter of trans choreographies.
Keywords: trans, corporeality, choreography, formalism
Bio: Wesleigh Gates is an artist and PhD candidate in Culture and Performance at UCLA, researching trans corporeality and subjectivity. Her dissertation project focuses on trans boxers in the United States, reading their self-narrations for the imaginaries of embodiment and transition they produce and the ensuing implications for trans politics and public life. She is a recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award (subsequently revoked by the current administration for “gender ideology”), and has been published in PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, Gulf Coast Journal, and a special issue of Media-N on trans new media art, with work forthcoming in Transgender Studies Quarterly. MFA, Carnegie Mellon University.

Small Dance Party: A Workshop on Softness, Slowness, and Trans-Ecosomatics

Kei (Kate) Tsuruharatani

Workshop: I have desired to see queer dance spaces that value softness and attunement. I want to see trans elders dancing. Slowness in dance might be the key to studying transness in dance, as transness reveals the fundamental complexity of humanity. I dream of the dance trans people might dance after survival as if there were nothing to prove for their existence, identity, and livelihood. This workshop, Small Dance Party, is an immersive performance installation and participatory event, re-contextualizing Steve Paxton’s “small dance” within a Buddhist lineage and trans studies. The participants are invited to lie down, sit, stand, and move gently as they listen to their own body’s sensations dancing in the most subtle places during the quiet listening session. It is a practice of queering ecopoetics, forging human and nonhuman communities beyond boundaries, through awareness. Viewing the body through a Buddhist lens—as composed of the elemental nature of earth, water, fire, and air—we queer the body, sensing our connection to nature simply by observing our own undulations. Following the listening period, participants will be invited to a voluntary debrief session. This facilitated discussion will provide a gentle space for optional sharing, allowing for the verbal integration of the non-verbal experience. This is an invitation to rest, to attune, and to cultivate the dance of a sustainable future that includes trans bodies as nature.
Keywords: Steve Paxton, Buddhism, ecosomatics, trans studies
Bio: Kate Tsuruharatani is a transgender multidisciplinary artist, mindfulness educator, and MFA candidate in Dance at the University of Michigan. Born in Japan, her two-decade performance career spanned Broadway, the Metropolitan Opera, and international stages. Following her gender transition, Kate shifted her inquiry from the high-stakes virtuosity in commercial theater toward a practice of Dancing After Survival. Her research investigates softness and attunement as decolonial strategies against systemic burnout. Drawing on ten years of mindfulness teaching, her time as an ordained monk in the Theravada Buddhist lineage, and somatic practices like Noguchi Taiso, Kate explores the connection between dance, trans studies, and ecosomatics.

Geographies of Return: Practicing Afro//Queer Social Dance as Embodied Archive

jeremy de’jon guyton

Workshop: How do we listen to what was never spoken, and dance with what was never named, to chart a freedom that was never fully realized? This workshop invites participants to engage Afro//queer social dance as an embodied archival practice and site of critical inquiry. Rather than approaching the archive as a fixed repository of documents or objects, we will practice embodied listening and relational attunement as methods for engaging queer histories that were never fully recorded, named, or preserved. Participants will explore how rhythm, gesture, proximity, and sonic residue function as living forms of memory and transmission. Guided by an autoethnographic framework, the workshop moves through audio and visual materials from my personal family archive, with an invitation for participants to bring and engage their own materials, utilizing these artifacts as critical sites of investigation and critical fabulation. Through facilitated listening scores, open movement invitations, and reflective prompts, participants will attend to ancestral presence, intimate geographies, and the affective textures of Black queer life as they surface through the body, offering multiple entry points for dancers, scholars, and artist-researchers. Ultimately, the workshop positions Afro//queer social dance as a choreography of witnessing, a refusal to forget, and a geography of return, offering participants tools to practice embodied research beyond institutional archives.
Keywords: Embodied archival practice, Afro//queer social dance, Choreography as witnessing, Relational attunement, Critical fabulation
Bio: jeremy de’jon guyton is a performance artist and writer researching Afro//queer archives to chart pathways toward our collective liberation. With an M.F.A. in Choreography & Performance from Florida State University and a B.A. in Theatre & Performance Studies from Georgetown University, his choreographic research weaves together devised theatre-making practices, text and spoken word, media, and social and club movement languages to build immersive worlds that urge audiences to listen deeply, question critically, and dream big. He has toured internationally with critically acclaimed artists such as Solange Knowles, is an active member of regional and international artist collectives, has designed and managed programming at the intersection of arts and advocacy for both youth and adult artists, and also serves as founder and legacy steward of a.l.t. ^home, a creative residency and cultural archive erected in his family home in South Los Angeles. www.jeremydejon.com

Undressing Dance to Find Bodies: Klauss Vianna’s Search for a Brazilian Theatrical Dance in 1959 and 1987

Cora Miller Laszlo

Abstract: Questions about a sense of Brazilianness have long been present within Brazil and its interactions with the global stage, haunting artists, intellectuals, and politicians who have tried to make sense of, or impose perspectives on, the identity of a country deeply marked by colonialism. In the dance field, these concerns also emerge, as in the work of Brazilian dancer, choreographer, and educator Klauss Vianna (1928–1992). Born in Belo Horizonte and trained in ballet, Vianna began his research by questioning the possibility of a Brazilian ballet and eventually developed a pedagogy of experimental dance improvisation, becoming influential in the 1970s’ countercultural theatre in Rio de Janeiro and in the 1980s’ development of contemporary dance in São Paulo. Focusing on his first and last larger choreographic works—Caso do Vestido (1959) and Dã-Dá Corpo (1987), both of which draw on Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poems—this paper examines how Vianna’s choreographic choices shifted and which ideas of Brazil he mobilized. Dialoguing with the works’ titles, I suggest that Vianna sought to “undress” dance to find the body, and I ask what happened to his notion of brasilidade—including its understandings of race and gender—through this process. Through choreographic analysis of videos, photographs, and archival materials, I argue that Vianna’s practice evolved from an idealized conception of Brazilianness to an experiential one. By offering the first comparative study of these works and their shifting articulations of Brazilianness—and by centering a choreographer largely unknown outside Brazil—this paper contributes new insights to both Brazilian studies and dance studies.
Bio: Cora Laszlo is a Brazilian dance-maker, teacher, and researcher. She is a PhD candidate in Cultures and Performance at UCLA, holds an MA in Performance Studies at NYU, a BA in Dance, and a Licentiate degree in Dance Teaching at Unicamp, and a specialization degree in Klauss Vianna Technique at PUCSP (Brazil). Her research focuses on dance improvisation, presence studies, decolonial practices, and critical pedagogies. She is the author of the book Outros Caminhos de Dança (2018). As an artist, Cora has created multiple pieces, collaborated with artists in the US, Brazil, and France, performed at venues like the Fowler Museum, MR at Judson Church, and Sesc-Brazil, and was selected for residencies as HTDS Art Residency (2025-2026) and LEIMAY Fellowship (2021). Cora’s doctoral research examines Brazilian dance pedagogical experiences on improvisation that challenged Eurocentric dance practices after the 1960s, amidst the turbulent artistic and political developments of the time.

Decoding Embodied Conscientização: The Liberatory Praxis of Brazilian Zouk and Lambada Dancing

Sydney Schiff

Abstract: Perpetually emerging, Brazilian Zouk is a border-crossing fusion of social and theatrical dance styles rooted in Lambada, a popular dance craze from the Northeast of Brazil that swept the globe in the early 1990s. As an avid practitioner from 2016 to the present day, I have witnessed the form’s establishment in North America and international conversations about the dance’s cultural identity as it seeks to maintain a core amid the forces of commercialization and globalization. Looking back, I identify community, connection, and creativity as crucial vanguards of the dance. Today, I understand these concepts to be core elements of Brazilian Zouk’s epistemology, one that circumscribes the relationship between dancers within the improvisational dialectic. In this paper, I engage Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Freire’s theory of dialogical action to explore how Brazilian Zouk functions as an epistemological laboratory whose liberatory politics are embedded in its critically thinking, problem-solving, co-authoring dancing bodies. Engaging dance scholar Hannah Kosstrin’s research methodology of “kinesthetic seeing,” I critically reflect on my participation as a student at Lambanapolis, a Lambada festival in Indianapolis held in 2023, as a case study that illuminates how a praxis of embodied critical consciousness is introduced and inscribed through the learning process.
Keywords: Brazilian Dance, Afro-Diasporic Modernisms, Practice as Research, Critical Consciousness, Cultural Identity
Bio: Sydney Schiff is a second-year PhD student in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UCSB. She holds an A.B. in History of Science and a Certificate in Dance from Princeton University and an M.F.A. in Dance with a focus on Choreography from the University of Michigan. Her research engages her lifelong embodied experience as a practitioner of diverse concert and popular social dances with a focus on ballet, contemporary, and Brazilian Zouk. Her current research focuses on the contemporary transformation of Brazilian Zouk and Lambada on the global stage and how the pursuit of cultural self-representation intersects with issues of race, gender, and class.

Shifting Narratives: Kuchipudi’s Contemporary Interventions (Hybrid)

Sindhuja Suryadevara

Abstract: This paper explores how Kuchipudi is reimagined to address contemporary social concerns. Traditionally, Kuchipudi has been associated with devotional stories and caste and gender restrictions, like in the Bhama Kalapam or Golla Kalapam. However, there has been an evolution in the themes and modern practitioners are reshaping these traditions to speak to concerns like caste inequality and ecological crisis, alongside devotional themes with a fresh outlook. I argue that Kuchipudi performances resist by centering the body, not as something to be consumed or displayed, but as a site of interruption and re-imagination. Through case studies of recent works that reinterpret canonical texts, I show how choreographers are shifting to a more critical approach by changing the rules in training and performance and by placing the dancing body at the centre. These examples reveal how choreography, technique, and performativity, some of the key terms in dance studies, open up differently through evolving ideas on dance and the dancing body. By placing Kuchipudi in global conversations on dance and social justice, this paper highlights the form’s ability to build alliances across difference. It rethinks how embodied work can reframe dominant structures while imagining new futures. In this way, Kuchipudi is not just a tradition but a living practice of intervention, where the body insists on alternative ways of being.
Key words- tradition, performativity, re-imagination
Bio: Sindhuja is a passionate practitioner of dance with a dedicated and disciplined approach. She holds a Master’s degree in Kuchipudi and Carnatic music, as well as a Ph.D. (awarded with a UGC scholarship) in dance from the University of Hyderabad. With grading from Doordarshan for Kuchipudi, Sindhuja has performed all over the country and abroad to acclaim. She has published articles and presented papers and talks on dance at prestigious events. She is trained in Bharatanatyam and is presently learning Odissi dance as well. She founded the Sinjini School of Arts (Regd.) and imparts training in Kuchipudi and Carnatic vocals. She works as an Assistant professor at the Department of Dance, Aria University.

“Put the Party in Your Body:” Kevin Aviance and Performances of Black Queendom

Eva Marie Gonzalez Ruskiewicz

Abstract: nightclubs, drag performance, racial capitalism, pedagogy, care
Kevin Aviance (he/she) is a genderqueer nightclub performer, self-described “Black queen of the club” and performance artist who commanded the late-90’s New York nightclub scene. In archival footage, Aviance dances on an elevated stage in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by throngs of seemingly-identical shirtless, white, presumably cisgendered gay men. This paper seeks to articulate the contours of Aviance’s Black queendom, as she reigns over the white, normatively gendered party attendees. This paper engages with a 90-minute video from the final party ever held at the Palladium nightclub in August 1997, featuring several iconic Aviance performances. Additionally, I draw insights about this party from a semi-structured interview with Aviance in September 2024, and archival newsclippings and ephemera from the Palladium. In my analysis, I critique a simplistic narrative of multicultural racial uplift, wherein Aviance’s queendom represents a form of utopian post-racial equality. And, while Aviance’s labor is situated within the legacy of black entertainment for white spectatorship, I resist a simplistic reading of his queendom as primarily exploitative. Instead, I argue that Aviance negotiates the powers, precarities, restraints, fissures and tensions of the Black queen through his nightclub performances. Rather than appearing effortless, Aviance’s experimental drag reveals the constraints of racial capitalism upon the body, and lays bare how capitalist structures begin to fray. Within her performances, I identify practices of care, pedagogy, defiance and excess, revelation and obfuscation. Her performance teaches party goers on how to refuse annihilation in the face of the AIDs epidemic, and models ways to exceed and disidentify with rigid structures of racial capitalism, gender, space and time.
Bio: Eva is a Latine transmasculine PhD candidate at UC San Diego’s department of Communication and Critical Gender Studies. Their work examines transgender and queer performances staged during moments of community crisis, documenting practices of care, teaching and learning. They are also a musician, songwriter, dancer and performance artist. Prior to graduate school, Eva taught elementary school music, and they remain a committed and passionate educator to this day.

Tweddabulula: How Ugandan Dancers Navigate Triple Consciousness Through Choreographic Code-Switching

Andrew Ssebulime

Abstract: This presentation examines how Ugandan diaspora communities in Southern California use folk dances to negotiate the layered experience of being simultaneously Ugandan, Black, and immigrant in the United States. Drawing from ongoing ethnographic fieldwork with dancers performing Baakisimba, Kizino, and Amagunju, I introduce two interconnected concepts: triple consciousness and choreographic code-switching. Triple consciousness extends W.E.B. Du Bois’s doubleness by adding immigrant positionality as a third dimension of embodied awareness. Ugandan dancers hold their ethnic identity, navigate U.S. racial formations shaped by the transatlantic slave trade, and manage their status as postcolonial migrants. These negotiations unfold through choreographic code-switching, defined here as deliberate adjustments in rhythm, gesture, spatial arrangement, and costuming based on venue, audience, and occasion. When performing at multicultural festivals, dancers may abbreviate sequences, soften pelvic movements, or amplify energetic elements to meet audience expectations of “African dance,” while embedding subtle sonic and gestural cues that signal home to Ugandan community members. In private gatherings, these same dances operate differently, prioritizing intergenerational transmission and nostalgic connection over external legibility. This work intervenes in African diaspora studies by centering East African migration histories that differ from Atlantic frameworks that dominate the field. By analyzing how dancers enact identity negotiations through movement choices, I argue that dance operates as both a kinesthetic archive and an adaptive practice. The Luganda term tweddabulula, meaning “translating ourselves,” captures this ongoing work of sustaining cultural memory while responding to the demands of diasporic life.
Keywords: Choreographic code-switching, Triple consciousness, Ugandan diaspora dance
Bio: Andrew Ssebulime is a PhD candidate in Critical Dance Studies at UC Riverside, working under Dr. Anusha Kedhar. His dissertation examines Ugandan folk dance in diaspora communities across Southern California. He holds an MA in Dance Knowledge, Practice and Heritage from the Université Clermont Auvergne, France (2022) and has taught East African folk dances across Uganda, China, Norway, and the United States. As a practitioner-scholar, Andrew’s work bridges performance ethnography, diaspora studies, and embodied memory practices. His writing has appeared in Dance Chronicle, Journal of African Cultural Studies, and the International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care, as well as edited volumes on dance education and heritage.

If I Could Unzip My Skin, Let the Air Taste Like Limes: Flesh and Fashion Performance in Contemporary Sri Lanka

Ravi Ranawaka

Abstract: This paper explores how fashion is not peripheral to choreography but one of its most volatile sites under necropolitical rule. Centering transgender and gender-nonconforming performance practices in Sri Lanka, it examines how sartorial choice functions as flesh in motion, a prosthetic technology that reorganizes posture, weight, and gesture, destabilizing the postcolonial state’s authority to define the limits of the human. Drawing on queer, transfeminist, and Black feminist frameworks, the paper brings Hortense Spillers’ theorization of flesh into dialogue with José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentification to show how queer sartorial performances refuse legibility rather than seek recognition. Through close performance and visual analysis of two Sri Lankan fashion-based performance practices, including the work of artist Chathuri Nissansala, it traces the emergence of chimeric, animalistic, and nonhuman forms produced through garments that deform bodily function and interrupt normative movement. Nissansala uses beadwork, fabric, and war detritus in their performances to illustrate how these sartorial materials bind, drag, camouflage, and overextend the body; it choreographs friction, hesitation, and excess, disturbing the smooth corporeal coherence demanded by state surveillance. Attending to the unstable threshold between dressed and undressed flesh, this paper situates queer and trans bodies within a necropolitical economy of exposure in which visibility is simultaneously enforced and punished. Colonial legal residues and their postcolonial afterlives render queer and trans subjects perpetually vulnerable, suspended between hypervisibility and erasure. By insisting on wear as an embodied tactic rather than an aesthetic choice, this paper reframes fashion as a movement practice and choreography as a political refusal. This South Asia-centered intervention challenges Eurocentric paradigms in dance studies and offers an embodied method for theorizing coalition through difference, risk, and refusal.
Keywords: Sri Lanka, Fashion, Dress, and Performance
Bio: Ravindu (Ravi) Ranawaka (they/them) is a PhD student in Culture and Performance in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. Their research focuses on the intersection of fashion studies, queer necropolitics, postcolonial theory, aesthetics, transfeminist epistemology, and Queer of Color critique. Ravi is currently conducting an ethnography on the critiques of necropolitical socio-governmental infrastructures implemented in postwar Sri Lanka, exploring how queer and trans Sri Lankan fashion designers respond through multimodal aesthetic and sartorial interventions. They are also a multidisciplinary artist, working across performance, music, fashion, and visual art.

Practicing Presence – Klauss Vianna Technique’s Strategies for Improvisation

Cora Miller Laszlo

Workshop: “Practicing Presence” is a dance improvisation workshop based on the Klauss Vianna Technique (KVT), a Brazilian dance and somatic education approach. The class will focus on the KVT’s strategies for working with different states of attention to develop and maintain a state of presence. Therefore, in this workshop, presence is a practice. By listening to the body, breathing through the joints, and feeling the weight, body supports, and impulses, the class will encourage participants to find ways to create their singular, and yet collective, improvised dances. Beyond the practice, the workshop will also contextualize KVT’s history on an overview of how it was developed by Rainer Vianna (1958-95) based on the dance practices created by his parents, Klauss Vianna (1928-92) and Angel Vianna (1928-2024)— figures who deeply informed the development of modern and contemporary dance in Brazil. Moreover, the workshop is built around underlying questions for the group to experiment with and discuss, such as what happens when presence is part of the dance practice? What kind of movements arise? What are the particularities of a dance improvisation practice that began in the Global South, and how does it impact the understanding of body, attention, collectivity, and resistance in the practice? During Cora Miller Laszlo’s decades-long experience with the Klauss Vianna Technique, the investigation of presence has been the focus of her research and the thread that connects her actions as an artist, teacher, and scholar, all of which are part of this workshop.
Keywords: presence, improvisation, Brazil, attention, movement investigation.
Bio: Cora Laszlo is a Brazilian dance-maker, teacher, and researcher. She is a PhD candidate in Cultures and Performance at UCLA, holds an MA in Performance Studies at NYU, a BA in Dance, and a Licentiate degree in Dance Teaching at Unicamp, and a specialization degree in Klauss Vianna Technique at PUCSP (Brazil). Her research focuses on dance improvisation, presence studies, decolonial practices, and critical pedagogies. She is the author of the book Outros Caminhos de Dança (2018). As an artist, Cora has created multiple pieces, collaborated with artists in the US, Brazil, and France, performed at venues like the Fowler Museum, MR at Judson Church, and Sesc-Brazil, and was selected for residencies as HTDS Art Residency (2025-2026) and LEIMAY Fellowship (2021). Cora’s doctoral research examines Brazilian dance pedagogical experiences on improvisation that challenged Eurocentric dance practices after the 1960s, amidst the turbulent artistic and political developments of the time.

Exorcitium Emergent Collective Poetics & Sonic Landscapes

Dorte Bjerre Jensen and Rosemary Hannon

Performance: “Poetry is not a Luxury” Audre Lorde
We need poetics to cope and respond to the present horrors. The Exorcitium is a participatory performative space moving across the etymologies of exorcism and exercise to address the destructive structures we are in. The piece offers practices in relation to the question: How can we be together differently as an act of resistance? And within such an immersive collaborative ritual new futures arise.
Bio: As an art worker DorteBjerres work is anchored in an evolving artistic inquiry into multisensory relations of attention through movement manifested as participatory performative scores as live art installations, lectures, classes, workshops, writing and mentorship. DorteBjerre holds an M.F.A. from the Danish National School of Performing Arts and is currently a PhD student at UCDavis Performance Studies. From 2019-2025, they were a part of the research project Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER): between Studio Olafur Eliasson and the Interacting Minds Centre (IMC), Århus university. DorteBjerre’s work is published in both artistic and scientific books and journals.

10 minutes and…

fateme monsef marani

Performance: My dance performance is conceived as an anti-movement a static and minimalist work that refuses conventional choreographic motion and instead redefines the meaning and boundaries of dance itself. Rather than presenting virtuosic or expressive movement, the performance centers on stillness, suspension, and endurance. The body appears not as a vehicle for spectacle, but as a site of presence, memory, and political tension. In this work, the refusal to move becomes the choreography. The performance explicitly engages the role of collective memory in shaping modes of struggle and resistance. It asks how bodies remember histories of protest, repression, and survival, and how these memories continue to circulate through flesh even in moments when movement is forbidden or controlled. This work approaches dance as a silent political act an embodied form of refusal, a living archive, and a practice of resistance enacted through stillness. It is a dance that resists dance itself.
Bio: I hail from the land of mystique and poetry—Iran. As an Iranian dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker emerging from the underground generation of artists in my country, I strive to explore the intersection of identity and art. I earned my BFA from Soore Art University in Tehran and am currently pursuing an MFA in Dance at Ohio State University. As an artist, I grapple with profound questions: Who am I as an Iranian artist? What is my essence? How can I navigate the dual roles of being both an artist and a woman in a challenging environment? My journey has often felt like a struggle for visibility; as a female dancer in society, I have wrestled with the complexities of my sexuality and artistry, both of which have been deemed unacceptable. When I dance, I confront societal norms and transcend limitations. My work aims to evoke therapeutic benefits and challenge perceptions, particularly regarding the role of women in Iranian society. I believe that dance is not just an art form; it holds a crucial place in the cultural narrative, especially for women.

Mangle: Performing the Caribbean Mangrove

Tess Losada-Tindall and Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón

Performance: This work is an embodied exploration of the intersections between the trajectory of the Caribbean mangle and the diasporic grief born from forced migration. The mangle is characterized by wide-spreading entangled root systems which have borne witness to the violence of more than five hundred years of conquest in the Caribbean archipelago. The displacement of the mangle’s seedlings—which drop from its branches in a process akin to live birth—evokes diasporic migration as they are swept away by the currents of the waters in which it grows. The experiences of migration and becoming diaspora are entangled and heavily weighted by development and necessity. Through the performance of this embodied knowledge, we trace the cartography of the mangrove roots in order to better understand the intersection of environmental destruction and migration. The condition of displacement highlights the persistent ghostly reflections of colonial histories upon the current climate and migration crises. How can performance further our understanding of the complexities of forced migration from the Caribbean archipelago to the Caribbean diaspora? Through a framework of intersectional environmentalism and embodied knowledge, this work is uniquely situated to potently communicate the magnitude of environmental frailty and how it connects to diasporic grief over the loss of a homeland. This research creates a zone of convergence between performance studies, diaspora studies and environmental research. We posit that “Mangle” sheds light upon interdisciplinary ways of understanding environmental decline, colonial legacies, and diasporic experience—and their consequences on human movement both in migration and in performance.
Keywords: migration, Caribbean, diaspora, performance, partnering
Bio: Tess Angelica Losada-Tindall is a Cuban-American choreographer, and scholar who holds an MFA in Dance from WashU in St. Louis. Her work considers exile, cultural straddling, and diasporic grief, and has been performed nationally and internationally, most recently at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, and in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Puerto Rican movement artist Lourdes del Mar Santiago Lebrón creates artistic explorations that provoke inquisition and demand attention. A sense of urgency is common in their work, as art has long been a persuasive means of coping and communication, facilitating a healing and exploratory experience for dancers and audiences alike.

Unfix

Fana Fraser

Performance: This dance performs itself as an experiment in theater, moving through sounding text towards producing an atmosphere where sacred fantasies of queer Black Island erotic desire can be easily shaped through voice. The dance lingers in upheaval from the ‘unfix’ – an action through which imposition is shaken out, or physicalized from psycho-somatic practices of decolonization. Gestures arise in temporal patterns that resound psychological resistance to remnants of British law governing gender and sexuality in Trinidad & Tobago during the colonial period 1797 to 1962 – which occurred on the heels of forced establishment of the Catholic Church in Trinidad in the 15th century to the desecration of Kalinago rituals. The movement style present in ‘unfix’ is a queer contemporary Caribbnnnx aesthetic, and simultaneously, a futurist form, as it makes pathway for concepts of Black Islandness, drawn from Indigenous ontologies of connection to natural ecosystems of the archipelago to emerge. This work, ‘unfix’ is ignited by principles of hope, upheaval, negotiation, remains, migrations, and living pleasure through repetitive polyrhythmic structures. Black Feminist scholar Hortense Spillers has noted: “Black women are the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb”. In agreement and antithesis with Spillers’ hypothesis, ‘unfix’ performs erotic agency through queer Black Island femme embodiment to edge transformation of this overview, to demonstrate that expression of desire within the sexual universe is indeed possible for Black womxn, and by any means necessary – this action of expression can be cultivated, repeated, and taught through reclamations of queer sexuality.
Bio: With reverence for fantasy, I time choreographies for live performance, film, dance, theater and opera. My impulse to shape psycho-emotional material into dance is ignited from desire calculated towards pleasure amidst grief and urged along with eruptions, placements and displacements of queer Black Ecstasy. I cling to intimate and intricate narratives that are told and told again, through which meaning can be registered. I work with movement abstraction, sound, text, improvisation and composition across outdoor environments, studios, and theater spaces. The push and pull of engaging with other beings feels undeniable. I have been an artist in residence at Djerassi Resident Artists Program, The Watermill Center, BAM Fisher Studio, Movement Research, Abrons Arts Center, MANCC Forward Dialogues, Petronio Residency Center, New Waves! Dance & Performance Institute and other spaces. My live performance work has been presented at several venues across New York, and in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Trinidad & Tobago. fanafraser.com

Smarasundaranguni as flesh, desire, and agency

Aarabhi Achanta

Performance: This performance offers a solo Kuchipudi interpretation of the javali(romantic monologue) “Smarasundaranguni” (rāgam: Paras, tālam: Ādi) by Dharmapuri Subbarayar, centering the nayika’s embodied desire as a site of agency, contradiction, and fleshly knowledge. A javali is a romantic composition in Carnatic and dance repertoires that foregrounds śṛṅgāra (erotic love), often through female-voiced lyrics attributed to male composers. In this piece, the protagonist is a swādhīnapatikā nāyikā who openly boasts of her beloved’s beauty, valor, and unwavering devotion, taking pleasure in her power to name his exclusivity and to claim satisfaction of her every wish. The choreography treats her declarations not as simple romantic fantasy but as negotiations of power, vulnerability, and self-fashioning under patriarchal norms. Working with Hortense Spillers’s theorization of flesh, the performance attends to how the nayika’s body—its glances, weight shifts, and micro-gestures—materializes a sensuous, excessive subjectivity that cannot be fully contained by idealized images of chaste classical femininity. For an audience unfamiliar with Indian classical dance, “Smarasundaranguni” becomes a study in how a dancing body can hold pride, longing, doubt, and pleasure at once, and how erotic expression on stage may function as both compliance with respectability and subtle refusal, opening space for coalition across differently gendered and racialized bodies who read themselves into her flesh.
Keywords: Kuchipudi; javali; erotic embodiment; nayika; agency Sample APA 7 references Apsaras Arts. (2024, April 7). The consummate musicianship of a dancer. https://www.apsarasarts.com[13] Dharmapuri Subbaraaya Aiyyar. (n.d.). *Royal Carpet Carnatic Composers*. karnATik.[16] Dharmapuri Subbaraaya Aiyyar. (n.d.). *Bhagavatha*. NAMA.[15] “Smara Sundaranguni Javali | Dharmapuri Subbarayar.” (2022, September 15). *YouTube*.[14]
Bio: Aarabhi Achanta is a Kuchipudi dancer and emerging scholar whose work bridges rigorous classical training with contemporary inquiry. She has trained at Natyalaya Kuchipudi School of Dance since 2010, completing her professional debut(arangetram) in 2022 and now serving as a senior artist and teacher supporting younger students in foundational technique and abhinaya. As a RAW Dance Fellowship resident artist at SAFEhouse Arts in San Francisco, she develops original choreographic works and presents them in festival settings, expanding Kuchipudi’s reach to diverse audiences. Her performance career includes solo appearances at the Mysore Jaganmohan Palace and as a headlining artist at the West WAVE festival, one of the West Coast’s longest-running contemporary dance platforms. Parallel to her dance practice, Aarabhi holds triple bachelor’s degrees in Physics, Astrophysics, and Mathematics from UC Berkeley and is completing her PhD at Stanford University, informing her research-driven, interdisciplinary approach to movement, pedagogy, and performance-making.

Running Ends: Reimagining Rope Bondage & Movement

Sur Sanford

Performance: Running end(s): Reimagining Rope Bondage & Movement is an experimental solo performance diary where I investigate my relationship to the historical significance of Black bodies/flesh in rope and how I navigate my own intrusive thought-scape or mind maze in relation to the tool/portal of rope itself. As a Black/Queer/Trans-Non-binary practitioner scholar, I’m constantly grappling with the historical implications of practicing rope bondage/shibari within the BDSM/Kink community. In my research performance I will be challenging the ethics of rope bondage on Black flesh, invoking memories, inciting pain, and finding release through my dance amongst the rope. My movement will be a mapping and investigation around BDSM tools (such as: rope, floggers, whips, paddles, and leather). I will be improvising and being influenced by the rope itself to contort, mold and/or bind my body. This performance will contain a music score, along with repetitive movement sequences that build one another depending on the tool I am in conversation with. Within this work I grapple with the intersections of race amongst the BDSM community by engaging with my own embodied black history and contemporary movement practices to fuel a liberatory reframe to BDSM tools/space. In hopes to create and support a space for generative dialogue around important conversations of black people within rope bondage/shibari spaces. This project also suggests my contemporary approach to be one that is still saturated in ancestral remembrance and deep honoring. Ancestral remembrance in this space is conjured by the tools, rituals, music score and most importantly my dancing. This project carries much more than what some may call taboo content but it carries spirit. I choose to dance with the spirit of resilience, protection, and (re)rooting throughout this black thought scape.
Keywords: Rope Bondage, BDSM/Kink, Blackness
Bio: SUR (They/He) is a Black/Queer/Trans-Nonbinary practitioner scholar whose work is rooted in reimagining parallels of BDSM and dance studies grounded in a Queer Afrocentric theoretical framework. SUR’s research is concerned with the amount of pain movement artists navigate in dance spaces, how dancers challenge the ethics of consent and care in dance spaces, power dynamics in dance spaces, and the power of visible/invisible bruises that create discourse amongst Black bodies and the impact that historical spectacles of Black pain and suffering have on contemporary practices in dance and BDSM. SUR received their M.A in Communication Studies from California State University, Northridge with research that focused in Performance and Black studies.

Coming to Term

Camila Simonin

Performance: In Coming to Term, I am interested in the questions: “Have you ever been told the circumstances of your nation’s birth?” and “Can a nation be born multiple times?”. The piece, created in January 2024, is also a way to represent the contemporary far right as a transnational wave, to investigate the gestures of right-wing leaders and to perform with/against their words. In addition, I see it as a way to (1) highlight the phenomenon of the far right across the globe as a choreographic aesthetic movement and (2) understand how the contemporary far right captured tactics of mobilization from the left for their own populist project to become a possible political scenario in many countries.
Keywords: politics, nation, experimental dance, conference-performance
Bio: Camila Simonin is an artist-researcher and a Phd student in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University in Chicago. She holds a master’s degree in Performance Studies from New York University (NYU) and a master’s degree in Dance Studies from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She has presented her work at conferences in the United States, South America, and Europe, and has published articles in international journals such as IDyM (Investigaciones en Danza y Movimiento) in Buenos Aires. In her artistic work, she acts primarily as a director and performer. Camila has won awards at festivals in Brazil, having presented most of her work in Rio de Janeiro, Chicago, and New York. For more information on Camila’s portfolio, access: camilasimonin.com/work For more information on Camila’s CV, access: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yUp3MZESSg_yHuGoTOoRGcK817rke05xysjBKCqbwD4/edit?usp=sharing

Drowning in Dance- Data

Jorge P. Yanez (Angel)

Performance: Starting with the synovial fluid lubricating the dancer’s knees at the motion capture studio, continuing with the sweat stains on gamers’ couches, and culminating with the liquid income that the companies behind hit titles like Fortnite generate by selling choreographic material; there is an overarching liquidity that dance turned into data traces across bodies and devices. Different kinds of liquefication can be seen throughout the digitization stages of the dancing body, demonstrating an interconnecting thread between performance and dance on the screen that is fundamentally material, chemical, and physiological. This performance rehearses a juxtaposition of digital and physical corporealities that forces users’ bodily schemas to be reformulated into techno human embodiments. The mutual correspondence of the incursion of dance into the numerical feld and the numerical into dance evidences the kinetic motor behind the capital accumulation of the new emergent economy of digital dance, whose hallmark is a fluidity that liquifies bodies into currency and back. The piece incorporates 3d algorithmic images from a colleague in the Computer Sciences Department and a medical intervention orchestrated along with a colleague from the Hispanic Studies Department. Keywords: Hydrologic, Data, Motion Capture, 3d images, Queerness.
Bio: Jorge Poveda Yánez is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar with formal training in the performing arts, social sciences, anthropology and the law. As a Fulbright scholar, he became a teaching assistant and doctoral fellow at the University of California, Riverside, where he currently works. Jorge uses a combination of performance, drag, and theoretical research to explore the artistic, biological, and environmental implications of the integration of the dancing body with different kinds of technologies. These investigations entangle his participation in queer Ballroom and in ceremonial contexts with the Yaqui nation. Jorge’s recent mixed-media performances include “BIOKINEME2”, “Forgotten Science”, and “A Queer Reggaeton Dance for the End of Our Times” presented across the US, Belgium, and France. Some of his written publications include “From Humans That Move Like Machines to Machines That Move Like Humans” (Dance and Movement Research Journal), “Drowning in Dance Data” (DOCUMENTA Journal), and “Dancing Someone Else’s Dance Through Someone Else’s Body” (Dance Articulated Journal). The guiding keywords spearheading his current projects are: computation, metabolization, reverence, and pleasure.

Dirty Water

Venghour Than

Performance: ទឹកកខ្វក់ means “Dirty Water.” The 15-minute dance explores and experiments with compositions, movements, and gestures of the body that are centered on the specific experience of a Cambodian, post-genocidal, queer subject. It is Than’s first choreographic experiment as a graduate student in UC Riverside’s MFA Program in the Department of Dance. Deeply invested in the epistemology of queer existence and politics in Cambodia—the country where he was born and raised—Than is on the journey, process, and attempt of seeking the “beyond,” a space for queer liberation and emergence in post-war and post-genocide Cambodia. The choreography meditates on Than’s physically and intensively trained body and mind in Cambodian classical dance, which is restrictively allowed for girls and women to learn and practice. The gender-restrictive confinement in the dance tradition then emboldens Than to gradually see the problematic definition of Cambodia’s national body, especially regarding mechanisms of inclusivity. Where is the space for queer Cambodian dancers? Through the metronomic soundscape in the work, Than arrives at an important critique of Dirty Water that centers on the nature of ephemerality as traveling—always in motion—in the world of Cambodian queerness. Dirty Water interrupts the power of creating definitions. It explores how one queer subject offers endless possibilities for imagination, liberation, and freedom.
Keywords: Cambodian queerness, Post-genocide embodiment, Decolonial emergence, Precarity, Liberation
Bio: Venghour Than is an emergent queer artist and a fishing-village dancer from Cambodian. He is also a son, raised Khmer Rouge genocide survivors during a period of relative stability. From a young age, he witnessed the lingering legacy of violence beneath his parents’ smiles—heard in the rhythms of their footsteps, the wariness of their voices, and the bleakness in their eyes. He later understood these observations as an introduction to dance and performance: strategies to pretend, endure, and survive life after war had stripped everything away. Than trained as a classical dancer with Cambodia’s first gay dance company, Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA. He was a student-resident at La MaMa Performing Arts in New York City and interned with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and New York Live Arts. Currently, he is an MFA candidate in Experimental Choreography at UC Riverside, researching queer bodies in post-genocide Cambodia through dance, ethnography, film, performance, and archives, asking: What is healing in movement?

Dolls

Sammy Briseno (Divina) & Sabree Gilkes (Icon)

Performance: Infinity duo, Icon and Divina present to you Dolls, an experimental dance and musical performance that investigates the multiplicity of our trans identity and the expansiveness of self we have experienced through centralizing transness. Icon and Divina are life, art, dance, and music partners in a constant state of collaboration. Our intersectional identities as queer and trans people of color, activates our voices and moves our bodies. With our choreography, gestures, spoken word, music, and visuals we will visibilize our endless migration through transcendence, reflecting the non-linearity, and emphasize our commitment to a practice of pushing beyond the binaries that we once adhered to as a product of deep dissemination of cisheteronormative ideals throughout our upbringing. Through our lived experiences, study of queer and radical scholarship, such as Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-Fabulation, and inspiration from revolutionary queer and trans figures, such as Marsha P. Johnson, we intend to transport the audience through an experimental musical and dance performance that emphasizes our “right to show [our] color,” and highlights the beauty, art, joy, struggles, negotiations, love, brilliance, and resilience of us as queer and trans people of color (LaBeija, 1968). Our goal is to make a work that speaks to how migration and the memories we’ve made serve as ways of understanding who we are and what we represent, and how practicing fierceness over fear can help us move through space as our most authentic selves especially with support of our community.
Keywords: trans, Afro-Fabulation, identity, queerness
Bio: Sammy/Divina is a queer and trans multi-hyphenate artist who enchants the space with their magic, rumbles the ground with their movements, and jesters with mischievous modes of moving drawing out questions, concerns, curiosities. Their dance and performance art works focus on dance as storytelling, community building and collective care, specifically for BIPOC & LGBTQIA+ communities. A descendant of immigrant land laborers who sprouted new life in the twin-border cities Mexicali-Calexico, Sammy queerly disrupts any confining configuration or binding binary, through their capacity to transform, flexibility to adapt, their groundedness and through their intentionality. Sammy’s work is sensational, dreamy, imaginative, reflective, and weaves together a collective tapestry of their identities, to pull the threads to a tighter tension, not only adorn but also to address our many intersections and how these intersectionalities are widely contested inside of our current political regime.
Icon (Sabree) brings the coolness of the ocean, ideas flow and the aesthetics that surround it flood the space, and like water, they don’t stop existing, they continue in a cycle of reformation recycling back into each other. Their art explores the intersections of identity, observations of the Black Queer and Trans experience and Blackness along with Black aesthetics as a whole. From fashion, music production and dance, Icon blends the binary and creates worlds for observers to explore experiences and themselves within. While Sabree has had history in dance and performance, experimental choreography is a new path they have had the gracious opportunity to explore with Sammy. Icon hopes to bring their skills of Hip-hop, Vogue, commercial choreography and essence to every floor they have the pleasure to perform on while leaving their chrome glow upon the space and those within it.