2024 Movement Research Festival presents Sahar Damoni
Company:
Movement Research
The Movement Research Festival returns with events happening over two weeks, February 28-March 9, 2024. The 2024 Festival is curated by Marýa Wethers, Director of the GPS/Global Practice Sharing Program at Movement Research, with a focus on the artists and partnerships developed through MR’s GPS MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Exchange Program. The Festival features performances at Movement Research at the Judson Church and Danspace Project, artist talks (GPS Chats and Studies Project), and movement workshops led by festival artists.
The program on Friday, March 8, features Sahar Damoni (Palestine).
Eat Banana and Drink Pills is a contemporary dance performance about abortion among single Arab Palestinian women. The work focuses on the physical and emotional experience, and the social dimensions for this experience. The work analyzes ramifications of this choice and the stigma, trauma, and social violence it carries.
“The traumatic moment engraved in the psyche is translated into an uninhibited immersion of the choreographer in the body, in a way that merges the past with the present into an unfiltered “now,” and only at the end does the understanding sharpen that this shared and exposed time with the audience holds the possibility of healing.” (Idit Suslik, Writer, The Contemporary Eye)
Sahar Damoni is a Palestinian, Arab, Christian dancer, choreographer, and dance teacher from Shafa-amer in Galilee in the Middle East whose body of work deals with the challenges she faces as a woman in an Arab and Palestinian society. Damoni holds a Bachelor of Dance and Movement for Practicing Teachers from Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and Arts. She danced with the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, and participated in many more projects concerning dance, choreography, dramaturgy, and acting in theaters with directors abroad before she began making her own work. Her work has been presented around the globe, including at Movement Research at the Judson Church (NYC), Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival, Internationale Solo-Tanz-Theater Festival Stuttgart, Echo Dance Festival of Northern Ireland, Hangartfest (Italy), Potsdamer Tanztage (Germany), and Curtain Up, International Exposure, and InitimaDance (Tel Aviv), among others. She has been invited to lecture about her work at Tel Aviv University, Sapir College, Kibbutzim College, Ben Gurion University, and University of the Arts, Philadelphia. In 2018, Damoni attended Ponderosa in Germany and participated in Translucent Borders, a project exploring ways that dancers and musicians act as catalysts for creative engagement across geographic, cultural, and economic borders, sponsored by New York University and Jacob’s Pillow. In 2019, she was invited to participate in Un/Controlled Gestures, a seminar on dance and body politic, organized by the Goethe Institute, Morocco. She was invited by Movement Research, NYC, for a monthlong residency and performance at Movement Research at the Judson Church as part of GPS/Global Practice Sharing. In February 2024 she will premiere her new creation Nawa at the Holland Dance Festival in Den Hague, Dresden, Germany, and in São Paulo, Brazil.
The GPS/Global Practice Sharing program provides a platform for the international exchange of ideas, processes, and reflective practices surrounding dance and movement-based forms between the U.S. and independent performing arts communities internationally. GPS posits that dialogue across differences necessarily catalyzes the generation of new knowledge and creative innovation. By investing in the mobility of artists, curators, and cultural workers, GPS advances cross-cultural understanding and the development of the contemporary arts field at large. Officially established in 2016, GPS consists of an informal network of partners currently supporting exchange projects in Eastern and Central Europe (ECE) and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
All events are FREE and open to the public. Advance reservations required at: https://movementresearch.org/events/series/festival/
