project team
Royona Mitra is the author of Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (Palgrave; 2015), which was awarded the 2017 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award by Dance Studies Association (DSA) and the 2016 Runner-up for the New Career Research in Theatre/Performance Prize by Theatre & Performance Research Association (TaPRA). She is Reader in Dance and Performance Cultures at Brunel University London. Royona’s scholarship contributes to discourses on ‘new interculturalisms’ that arise at the intersections between bodies, race, gender, sexuality and decoloniality in performance. royonamitra.com
Arabella Stanger is Lecturer in Drama: Theatre and Performance at the University of Sussex, where her work moves across dance and performance studies. Her current book project excavates the histories of spatial and racial dispossession underwriting idealisms of the Euro-American theatre dance canon. She is also embarking on new research into rebellious bodies at sea. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/230805/research
Simon Ellis is a dance artist and Associate Professor at C-DaRE – the Centre for Dance Research – at Coventry University. He is interested in the limits and possibilities of collaboration in choreographic processes, and in exploring experiences of power through choreographic practice. skellis.info
wider project group
Funmi Adewole is a VC2020 lecturer in Dance at De Montfort University Leicester where she also studied for her PhD in Dance Studies. She worked in the Nigerian media before moving to England in 1994. In England she began a performance career. Her credits include performances with Horse and Bamboo Mask and Puppetry Company, Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble, and the Chomondeleys. She also holds an M.A in Postcolonial Studies from Goldsmiths College, London. Her research interests include black British choreographers, the theory and choreographic practice of Dance of the Africa and the Diaspora as a professional and artistic contexts, Dance in the cultural industries in Africa and Storytelling as performance.
Bojana Cvejić is Associate Professor of Dance and Dance Theory, Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), and Coordinator of Research Studios Program, P.A.R.T.S. School for Contemporary Dance, Brussels
Born and raised in Malaysia, JiaXuan Hon is a freelance dance producer based in London, UK. She has been company producer of AΦEsince 2015 and produced its first major commission WHIST, a dance and Virtual Reality production. She has previously held long-term working relationships with some of the best contemporary dance artists, such as Akram Khan (UK), Yang Liping (China) and Fang-Yi Sheu (Taiwan) and managed some of their most important productions between 2010 and 2017.
Prarthana Purkayastha is a Senior Lecturer in Dance, Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she also co-founded the Centre for Asian Theatre and Dance. Her research interests include dance, embodied histories, race, feminism, colonial and postcolonial theory.
Cristina Fernandes Rosa is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton’s Department of Dance. She in interested in the relationships between embodiment, cognition, and knowledge production in the global context. In her book Brazilian Bodies and Their Choreographies of Identification (2015) Cristina examines how aesthetic principles cultivated across the black Atlantic contributed to the construction of Brazil as an imagined community. Her current research project, Movements of Sustainability, investigates projects that intertwine non-Western movement practices (i.e. capoeira, yoga, butoh, meditation, etc) with the concept of sustainability: the care of self; the care of others; the care of environments; and the care of knowledges and ways of knowing.
Grace Okereke is an independent dance producer and manager who has worked with organisations and independent companies such as, Rambert, Crystal Palace Festival, Greenwich Dance, East London Dance, Mayuri Boonham | ATMA Dance, Luca Silvestrini’s Protein Dance, The Body Narratives and more. At present Grace is focused on her work with Vicki Igbokwe | Uchenna Dance, Alleyne Dance and Alesandra Seutin. Grace is starting her own company, Uprise Rebel, that supports Black female choreographers and administrators, as well as developing inclusive audiences.