Makisig Akin & Anya Cloud: We Are (nothing) Everything

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Dance@Bennington presents Makisig Akin & Anya Cloud: We Are (nothing) Everything.

Through performance we cultivate impossible conditions as an invitation to elusive spaces where desire, guilt, grief, and love intersect. What can we do together that we cannot do alone? The work invites expanding dominant notions of truth; a queer Noah’s Ark — two by two as an ode for our future ancestors. It is a reimagination of the creation story. With patience, tenderness, and prayer the work epitomizes the multiple ways that love can manifest. We embody the wildest dreams of our queer ancestors. Intimacy facilitates straddling and queering notions of violence, care, pleasure, play, and gender.

Makisig Akin (they/them)
Choreographer. Dance Artist. Facilitator. Activist.
I am a queer, transgender Filipino born and raised in the Philippines. My artistic work focuses on strengthening the recognition of intersectional identities, reconnecting with my ancestry, and decentralizing Western ideologies in dance making. Since graduating from University of California Los Angeles with Masters of Fine Arts in Choreography in June 2019 from the department of World Arts and Cultures Dance, I have been in the quest to further understanding how to use the platforms of dance and theatre to engage with socio-political topics in the perspective of queer and BiPOC individuals. I examine how survival strategies can be translated into a communal physical practice, which I then use as a catalyst to a creative healing process. I am interested in reimagining the process of making-dances. How can the process serve the dancers as they continue to have agency in directing the trajectory of the work? How can they create a community that functions beyond identity while honoring identity? My physical dance background includes but is not limited to: Filipino Traditional Dance, Contact Improvisation, Kung Fu, Improvisation, walking meditation, Authentic Movement, Bouldering/Climbing and Contemporary Dance. Currently living in Berlin, Germany my newest work Give me your heart. No, the real one. is being produced by Tanzfabrik, Uferstudios and Dock 11 in February 2022. My works have been supported by Tanzfabrik Artist Residency, Nah Dran Extended/ADA studios, Fonds Darstellende Künste #TakeHeart 2022, Schloss Bröllin Residency 2022.

Anya Cloud (she/her)
I am originally from Alaska, and currently living in the land of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe people in Colorado. As a queer, cis-gender, female, white person I orient my work to cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice; intersectional collaboration is central to my work. I am devoted to practicing, researching, teaching, and performing experimental contemporary dance, contact improvisation, and somatics through anti-oppression methodologies. I have been practicing contact improvisation for 20 years and regularly teach, practice, and perform internationally. I orient with contact improvisation as a fundamentally queer form. My work has been produced/supported by Movement Research, Workshop Foundation, freeskewl, Screen Dance Festival Stockholm, La MaMa, Los Angeles PerformancePractice, REDCAT, Tanzquartier, and Guatemala Department of Culture among others. I have worked with and/or performed for Sara Shelton Mann, Nancy Stark Smith, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Karen Schaffman, Karen Nelson, Makisig Akin, Justin Morrison, Mary Pearson, and Nhu Nguyen among others. I hold an MFA in Dance Theatre and trained in the Feldenkrais Method® under the direction of Elizabeth Beringer. I am currently Assistant Professor of Dance at University of Colorado Boulder.

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