MAKISIG AKIN & ANYA CLOUD – WE ARE (NOTHING) EVERYTHING

FRIDAY 17TH MAY 8PM £12

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CLICK HERE FOR WORKSHOP ON 18TH & 19TH MAY

What can we do together that we cannot do alone?

This dance duet is a queer reimagination of a creation story. With patience, tenderness, and prayer we epitomize the multiple ways that love can manifest. Intimacy facilitates straddling and queering notions of violence, care, pleasure, play, and gender.

Through performance we cultivate impossible conditions as an invitation to elusive spaces where desire, guilt, grief, and love intersect. We hold the complexity and paradox of being socialized female bodies who are queer and racialized.

Sometimes we share a body and sometimes we splinter into the ether — we simultaneously elevate each other and take each other down.

We embody the wildest dreams of our queer ancestors.

This work has been supported by creative residencies at Schloss Bröllin, The Field Center, Atlas B2, University of Colorado Boulder Department of Theatre and Dance, and Bennington College.

Makisig Akin (they/them)

I am a queer, transgender Filipino born choreographer, dance artist, facilitator, and activist. I was raised in the Philippines and am currently based in Berlin, Germany. My work focuses on the recognition of intersectional identities, reconnecting with ancestry, and decentralizing Western ideologies in dance making. I examine how survival strategies can be translated into a communal physical practice, which I then use as a catalyst to a creative healing process. I have taught dance workshops and Contact Improvisation classes in many different communities including HZT, UCLA, Tanzfabrik Schule, Bennington College, The Field Center, Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation among others. My orientation to CI is deeply interconnected with my training in Filipino Traditional Dance, Kung Fu, Jiu Jitsu, Improvisation, walking meditation, Authentic Movement, Bouldering/Climbing, and Contemporary Dance. I received an MFA from UCLA in 2019. I co-founded The Love Makers, a project-based dance company, with Anya Cloud. I am the co-creator and co-director of Emerging Change Tanzfestival in Berlin, Germany. In the last three years my choreographic work has been presented in Tanzfabrik Bühne, Uferstudios, DOCK 11, Movement Research at the Judson, What You See Festival, OUTsider Fest, Tanztage Berlin, among others. My works have been supported by NEUSTART KULTUR Fonds Darstellende Künste, Distanzen in 2022/2023, Hauptstadtkulturfonds, and Fonds Darstellende Künste Flausen.

www.makisigakin.com

Anya Cloud (she/they)

I am an experimental contemporary dance artist originally from Alaska and currently based between Colorado and Berlin. As a queer white person, I orient my work to cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice. Collaboration, questioning, and deep physicality are central to all of my work. Makisig Akin and I co-direct the project-based dance company The Love Makers. Our work has recently been produced by DOCK 11, Tanzfabrik Berlin Bühne, Tanztage Berlin, Movement Research at the Judson, OUTsider Fest, and What You See Festival. Important collaborators include Makisig Akin, Sara Shelton Mann, Karen
Schaffman, Eric Geiger, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Nhu Nguyen among others. I have taught/facilitated contact improvisation, improvisation, contemporary dance, and somatics internationally at festivals and institutions including at Guatemala Contact Improvisation Festival, Tanzfabrik Berlin Schule, ImPulsTanz, Tanzquartier, wcciJAM, Ukraine Contact Improvisation Festival, Metamorphosis Improvisation Research Festival, The Field Center,
BeingTouch, and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation among others. I currently teach at the University of Colorado Boulder, earned an MFA from University of California San Diego, and am trained in the Feldenkrais Method® under Elizabeth Beringer.