Sat 8 JUN, 12—6pm
Independent Dance Siobhan Davies Studios 85 St. George’s Road London, SE1 6ER
Through a partnership with Independent Dance and the Finnish Institute, we are thrilled to be welcoming Sonya Lindfors back to London this summer to lead a one-day lab, Hope in the dark: working with speculative practices. This follows on from the We Should All Be Dreaming lab that Sonya led in 2022.
“Dire times call for soft measures! For the past years I have been busy with decolonial speculative practices and their potentiality to revitalise, restore and subvert. Or to imagine possible and impossible futures. This workshop that lends its name from Rebecca Soltnit’s book is an invitation to gather around the urgent and share tools and strategies to navigate in dark times. I will structure this lab with provocations, questions, and collective moving practices, with the aim to co-create a space with participants. It is open to artists, thinkers and activists who are happy to work with movement.” Sonya Lindfors.
One Drop (2023), a work by Sonya Lindfors. Photo Tuukka Ervasti
artists
Sonya Lindfors
Sonya Lindfors is a Cameroonian – Finnish choreographer and artistic director that also works with facilitating, community organizing and education. In 2013 she received a MA in choreography from the University of the Arts Helsinki.
She is the founding member and Artistic Director of UrbanApa, an inter-disciplinary and counter hegemonic arts community that offers a platform for new discourses and feminist art practices. UrbanApa facilitates workshops, festivals, labs, mentoring and publications among other things.
Lindfors makes her own and collaborative works such as performances, curated programs and performative actions. Her performance works have been shown and supported by Beursschouwburg, Kampnagel, Spring Utrecht, CODA – festival, Black Box Theater Oslo, Zodiak – Centre for New Dance among others. She is a member of Miracle Workers Collective that represented Finland at the 58th Venice Biennale.
Lindfors’s recent works One Drop (2023), We Should All Be Dreaming, camouflage (2021), Soft Variations Online (2020) centralize questions around Blackness and Black body politics, representation and power structures, speculative futurieties and decolonial dreaming practices. On a larger scale Lindfors’s time is divided between her own artistic work , educational work and working as the artistic director of UrbanApa. In all her positions she pursues creating and facilitating anti-racist and feminist platforms, where a festival, a performance, a publication or a workshop can operate as the site of empowerment and radical collective dreaming.
Lindfors has been awarded with several prizes, the latest of which being the international Live art Anti Prize 2018. During the season 2017 – 2018 Lindfors was the house choreographer for Zodiak – center for new dance.