Through a partnership with Fest en Fest, H2DANCE and the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland, Independent Dance (ID) 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 with ID in 2022 during LIFT Festival (UK).
‘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 organising and education. Lindfors’ recent works One Drop (2023), common moves (2023), We Should All Be Dreaming, camouflage (2021), Soft Variations Online (2020) centralise 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.
Hope in the Dark: a lab with Sonya Lindfors on Saturday 8 June at Siobhan Davies Studios (85 St George’s Rd, London, SE1 6ER) at 12–6pm. Standard ticket £75, low-income ticket £60. More information and tickets please visit Independent Dance website.
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 at www.festenfest.info.
Image credit: One Drop (2023), a work by Sonya Lindfors. Photo Tuukka Ervasti
