ankita sharma is an experimental performance artist invested in world-making where content dictates genre and betrays expectation. Their creations unpack systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in body and mind. In aesthetic, their work is grungy, confrontational, and cheeky, a dance-horror, with physicality rooted in contemporary dance-theater and South Asian and African diasporic forms. They are guided by experimental impulses to iterate beyond what they know, obsessed with each project departing from the last. Storytelling, however, comes first, and Sharma’s stories ask for honesty, unpacking unspoken but overt inequities, focused on making large-scale deceptions of society digestible experiences that hold audiences accountable as agents in their own life.
Sharma’s work is being shown at venues across the US, including Denver Art Museum, Dixon Place, JACK, BASE, Abrons Arts Center, The Tank, University Settlement, and LaGuardia Performing Arts. They are in residence at BASE and GALLIM and have been a past MNE ECS Recipient, Performance Project Fellow, LEIMAY Incubator, and recipient of the Broadway League and Overton Memorial Award.
jagaana/Awaken/ In labor, Kali awakens to the demands of worship and is remade into an idol. jagaana/Awaken/ is an excerpt from ankita sharma’s dhoka/Betrayal/, in which Kali’s ultimate power tips into destruction as Hinduism is colonized into propaganda for violence.
“My creative history with New Dance Alliance goes a way long. Since my friend, Chivas Sandage brought me to New Dance Alliance to rehearse in early 90’s, the place has become a part of my creative life. The long time existence of the studio and Performance Mix Festival are vital to the artists who seek and explore deep into their process. Whenever I step into the studio, it’s a new space with a lot of memories. I lie down on the floor, listen to my body, and I dance. It is valuable. The time in the space nurtures my practice and artistic vision. Karen’s vision of Lift-Off residency, feedback sessions, providing peer to peer connections are more significant than ever. It has been helping us to get through 2020 and we are going into 2021.”
– Nami Yamamoto
New Dance Alliance
182 Duane Street
New York, NY 10013