Uncategorized – Akshay Sharma Dance

Can This Place Be A Temple?

Posted on February 24, 2023February 24, 2023 by Akshay Sharma in Uncategorized

Pic : Camilla Greenwell

Can this place be a temple? is a new contemporary dance solo show that uses text, music and voice. It touches on themes of race, gender, migration and environment using dance, stories, fictional worlds and contemporary events. It is part autobiographical, part fictional and creates a refined sense of place through imagined worlds. Can this place be a temple is a question of refuge and safety for all of us that draws upon personal events and writings

The solo has had a period of Research and Development supported by Funding from Arts Council England, Choreodrome research residency at The Place working with dramaturg Eva Martinez, Dance 4, Artist Development Programme Akram Khan Company.

” I find you the most compelling performer to watch. You have a unique beauty in the way you move and hold the space. I enjoyed the human touches and stories in your work – it gave it a sense of it’s place in the world which I appreciated greatly.”
– audience member , Encounters festival 2023, Yorkshire Dance

” What a joy it is watching you dance, with such integrity, authenticity and power. I was captivated.”
– audience member , Encounters festival 2023, Yorkshire Dance

We are looking for commissioning, touring and presenting partners for the solowork for autumn 2023 and 2024. Please get in touch

Preoccupations

Posted on November 16, 2020February 26, 2023 by Akshay Sharma in Blog, Uncategorized

What does practice mean in the absence of work and traditional ways in which we materialise our dance, i.e, classes, workshops, residencies, work. Daily conditioning of our bodies, improvising to house music, meditation, walks, chats, observation when space has contracted to the floor of our rooms, chair in the kitchen, sofa in the lobby. Room dancing and thinking has enlarged the possibilities of this body even though space asks me to reassess my limits.

What would decolonised dance look like? Do our ideas around reading space and time also need to change to plan a re-configuration of new dances.

Phrase-less dances and long improvisations that allow expansion and contraction of space and attention and take a leap of imagination. What modes of being surface when we watch dance and allow for that dance to be witnessed over a period of time. The solo in the solo dancing in an i-sol-ated landscape, creating and producing geographies of imagination that build new connections and ways of nurturing growth.

How do I nurture a desire to dance and is dance the heart of the matter? What is the theater of dance, the music of dance, the maths of this dance – many dances, not one, not a singular dance. It contains my history. Not the form of it. The dance of it – my education, my interests, my family history, my preoccupations.

Labour. Intellect vs manual labour. To do and to understand. To understand and to do. The physical commitment, the immersion, the suspension of belief, to value the never exhausting power that lies in the moving body. To rejoice in the sweat, the warmth, the poetry.

Themes on Night

Posted on October 30, 2020 by Akshay Sharma in Uncategorized

Commissioned by Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Leeds on their third year students, this was a week long exercise to create a short piece for Leeds Light Night to be performed at Yorkshire Dance.

Some questions on Labour

Posted on October 29, 2020November 12, 2020 by Akshay Sharma in Uncategorized

Awarded as part of Kalasangam’s Artist Takeover Residency in Bradford in 2017, I decided to explore some questions related to labour, dance and manual work. Manual- ness of work rather than manual work. This was a fruitful time of dancing just outside educational structures and has made me look at the practice of labour in my dance.

Labourers in the act of daily work in New Delhi.

Solo One

Posted on October 29, 2020July 20, 2021 by Akshay Sharma in Uncategorized

_{Filmed by Anmol Khurana}

First proposed as a solidarity to the wave of protests seen across India in the winter of 2019. A cry to create space for desire, power and freedom. To the moving and the movement.

It was a mess of religion and politics and cows and country and citizenship, and corruption and pollution, deaths and division, and countries and infrastructure and no studio space, no performance space no rehearsal space and finding and searching and looking and supporting and getting hit and getting hurt and police and violence and education and students and learning and sitting and shouting and marching and going towards and running away and despair and noise and fear and hope.

Audience reaction:

“I saw your performance … and I was left awestruck. Your movements are like water”

“Surreal”

Supported by Chandigarh Sangeet Natak Akademi. Thanking Puneet Jewandah, Mallika Chabba Harleen Duggal and Louisa Borgcostanzi-Potts for their friendship and continued support.

A Fragile Geography

Posted on October 29, 2020October 30, 2020 by Akshay Sharma in Uncategorized

A Fragile Geography is a delicate trio of connection, intimacy and offerings in a world growing old everyday. This dance came about in a three week residency at Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Leeds as part of Northern Connections.

Performers : Kathryn Hewison, Akshay Sharma and Isobel Ripley

Duration : 20 mins

Performed at The Riley Theater, Leeds

Supported by Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Leeds, Yorkshire Dance, Leeds, Spin Arts and Arts Council England.