Shivaangee Agrawal

Residency: Orbital Asymmetries

Orbital Asymmetries is a performance installation telling the story of four strangers who, over the course of 24 hours, journey together through intimacy, fatigue, play and isolation. It uniquely combines film, projection, live camera feeds and movement scores incorporating virtuosic folk dance techniques with contemporary group improvisation to create atmospheric ‘rooms’ in the open performance space for audience members to walk through and between. This piece is a rich, playful way to explore universal questions; Can we build kinship in conflict? How do we retain non-conformity within a community? Is it possible to be both in solidarity and dissent?

This piece is the culmination of four years of investigative, community-dance and choreographic research frame titled, VELOCITIES, which attends to tensions between collectivity and conformity through South Asian folk dance practice, and builds responsive movement frameworks that enable score participants to be both in community and in asynchrony.

This residency offers a meeting point for Shivaangee and her team to develop these frameworks by opening company rehearsals to the public and exploring a community cast model. This project is open to all but focuses on reaching BIPOC participants, with a focus on people who have experienced race-based marginalisation in community, displacement and/or immigration (personally and/or generationally).

More About Shivaangee Agrawal

Shivaangee is a choreographer and researcher drawing upon long-standing training in Bharatanatyam, and more experimental practices of performance. Their approach asks us to stay with our multiplicities (physically, socially, relationally, autobiographically, systemically) and unsettles preconceived assumptions about what is a recognisably ‘Indian’ aesthetic.

Shivaangee’s movement practice is classical in its underscoring by rhythmic patterns that are mathematical and complex; folk in its relational specificity, non-elitist physical demands and grounding in a collective experience; and experimental in its investigation of how dance can co-exist with sound-making, film, projection and collective composition.

Shivaangee has worked for a range of choreographers/directors, including J N Harrington, Jo Tyabji, Evie Manning, Sonia Sabri, Seeta Patel, Shane Shambhu and Suba Subramaniam and received ACE Project Grant & DYCP funding multiple times. Their work has been staged at Southbank Centre, Watermans Theatre, Blue Elephant Theatre, Kala Sangam, Bloomsbury Festival, Next Choreography Festival & Dance Umbrella Croydon.

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