'What would the dance and art scene look like if you got to decide?' artistic response
Collective cooking, reading, sounding
As part of this residency, Mikolai engages the audience in a collective Sri Lankan cooking session She shares a letter to her stomach, in which she writes about the context of food traditions, lost ingredients and the impact of colonization on food patterns and chronic illness. On another day of the residency, together with the artist Jan Val, they share a sound performance.
cooking session, letter reading, sound performance
credits
Jan Val, Sara Mikolai, apparatus GbR
'What do you need as a dancer and choreographer?'
artistic response
This artistic response was part of the Parcours und Think Tank Postmigrantische und (lokale) postkoloniale choreographische Perspektiven, organized and curated by Sandra Chatterjea. It is a response to the question: what do you need as a dancer and choreographer? It consists of audio recordings and text fragments that describe the challenges faced by choreographers with non-Western dance backgrounds, questioning the notions of contemporaneity, tradition, and the requirements placed on dance artists in dance institutions.
Elegie IV
This performance was created during the one-month artist residency PHARMAKOS/N: EIN APPARAT organized and curated by Apparatus GbR.
The performers engage in experimentation with movement, sound, and the materials provided in the space. Mikolai extended an invitation to the other artists participating in the residency to partake in this collective cleansing ritual. The artist employs turmeric and bay leaves, both of which possess antibacterial properties and are commonly used not only in South Asian cuisine but also in various ceremonial acts as cleansing agents. Movement, sound, song, and material converge in a situation that does not seek a specific material outcome, but rather focuses on the transformative power of collective cleansing itself.
Artist residency
Performance in response to residency theme
Choreography: Sara Mikolai
Performance: un collective, Hatam/Hacklander, Sara Mikolai
intervention 03.03
In this performance, the dancer investigates the correlation between movement and sound by employing the moving body as a catalyst for sound production. The costume not only generates sound by causing friction between the body and its material, but also camouflages the body against the white walls of the space. Throughout the entire dance, the dancer adheres to a 5-beat rhythm known as kanda tala, thereby establishing a consistent rhythmic pattern through the costume.
Performance
Concept, Choreography, Performance: Sara Mikolai
Special thanks to Nuray Demir, Rodrigo Alves and Pedra Costa
Mourning in protest
Sara has invited Garunya K. to explore their shared experiences of long-distance grief. Both have grown up in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Berlin, and after the civil war in Sri Lanka, the homeland of their parents, ended in 2009, they noticed a distinct feeling of numbness within their usually vibrant community. This numbness, they believe, can be attributed to the devastating conclusion of the war and the absence of a space for mourning, as well as the physical distance from their families and ancestral lands. In their dialogue, they have created an invented ritual performance that serves as a means of collective mourning. Through dance, song, and the activation of everyday objects of Tamil diasporic households, this performance aims to engage with grief, lost knowledge and displacement.
Performance
Concept & Choreography: Sara Mikolai
Performance: Garunya Karunaharamoorthy, Sara Mikolai
Special thanks to: Nuray Demir, Noha Ramadan
The Dotted Dance Project
The ‘Dotted Dance Project’ is an artistic research project initiated in 2014 as a collaboration between Kiran Kumar and Sara Mikolai. Conceived primarily as ongoing dialogues around their shared yet different traditions of Indian dance and music, the project seeks to frame the choreographic nature of dialogue and discourse.
Lecture Performance
Concept, Choreography & Performance:
Sara Mikolai, Kiran Kumar
Presented at
Inzucht Festival, HZT student festival, Uferstudios Berlin