Through a partnership with Fest en Fest, H2DANCE and the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland, we are thrilled to be welcoming Sonya Lindfors back to London 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 here 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. Taking its name from Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark, this lab 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.
Sonya Lindfors is a Cameroonian-Finnish choreographer and artistic director who also works with facilitating, community organizing and education. Lindfors’ recent works One Drop (2023), common moves (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 futurities and decolonial dreaming practices.
On a larger scale Lindfors’ 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.
We are offering five subsidized places (at £35) to students and those on low incomes. To register your interest, please email info@independentdance.co.uk by 1 June. Places will be allocated via a random lottery process and everyone who expresses interest will be informed of the outcome by 3 June.
Fest en Fest 2024: Discussion with Sonya Lindfors
As part of Fest en Fest 2024, Sonya Lindfors will have a conversation about her activist work and running of the festival Urban Apa, an interdisciplinary 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.
Sunday 9 June, 3pm-4.30pm at APT Gallery, Deptford.
Full information about this event and booking for the from 13 May at www.festenfest.info.
Further reading:
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), common moves (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’ 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 State Prize for Public Information in 2022 and the international Live art Anti Prize 2018.