Sujay Saple
Sujay Saple is the Artistic Director of Shapeshift – a performance company based in Mumbai. He has choreographed eight original works – ‘Unselfed’(2012), 'Moonfool’(2014), ‘Ghar Ki Murgi’(2017), ‘Agent Provocateur’(2017), ‘Sculpting Intimacy’ (2018), ‘This Is All There Is When There Is All This’ (2018), ‘Lullaby, Stranger’ (2018), and ‘Sons of the Soil’ (2018), which have been performed at various festivals and prestigious venues around India and received rave reviews. He has been an independent performer, director, designer and workshop conductor, working actively in the field of performing arts for over fifteen years, and on more than 40 collaborative performance projects.
Sujay's work is primarily visual and movement based, often situated in the intersection between dance and theatre. Like his previous work, his approach at the toolbox roots residency, too, will be collaborative and improvisational, engaging his performers and audiences with physically challenging and visually evocative.
Poorna Swami
Poorna Swami is an independent choreographer, dancer, and writer. At the age of seven, she began training in the classical Indian dance form Bharatanatyam, before extending her training to contemporary dance and post-modern techniques. Her choreographic works frequently cross disciplines and reflect her interest in converging formal investigations with conceptual concerns.
Poorna is currently touring India with her latest sound and performance installation, The Long and Short of It, in collaboration with Swiss composer Marcel Zaes. She has also performed her choreography in and around New York City, at venues such as the Wassaic Project Festival, Theater for the New City, and La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. For the 2017 edition of the Attakkalari India Biennial, she served as the editor of Attakkalari’s online dance magazine, Ligament, and facilitated the festival’s Writing on Dance Laboratory. Poorna is a 2018 recipient of the danceWEB scholarship at ImPulsTanz - Vienna International Dance Festival. She holds a BA in Dance-Theatre and English from Mount Holyoke College (USA). www.poornaswami.com
Breaking and Making Rules: Interdisciplinary Performance: "You must know the rules before breaking them". Perhaps that isn't entirely true. These practice-based sessions encourage participants to develop processes that are unique to their questions, investigations, and desires. Each participant will work on a miniature version of their performance-making process, from drawing board to presentation. The focus will be on making choices (of structure, design, vocabulary and even warm up) that are informed by what the work needs and not what we already know. We will explore a range of physical and conceptual exercises that sharpen technique, discard it, or avoid it altogether. The idea is to make our own toolboxes and at the same time be skeptical of using toolboxes in a formulaic way.
Joshua Salio
Joshua Sailo investigates movement through a multidisciplinary lens informed by close collaborations with other artists and improvisational studies. His playful approach towards performance-making stems from a curiosity towards the parallels, juxtapositions, and conjunctions that exist within the interaction of different art forms and contextualizing dance within the socio-political framework.
Joshua holds an MA in Dance awarded by Institute of The Arts Barcelona/Liverpool. John Moores University for his creative practice researching the emobdiment of gendered personifications and continues to deepen his choreographic investigation through the initiative Sailoway. Since its inception in 2018, Sailoway has had the opportunity to collaborate with a diverse range of artists with performances in Canada, Spain, Hungary and India.
As a performer, Joshua has worked with various international artists including Cirque du Soleil, Jasmin Vardimon Company, Nachom Arts Foundation, Studios Wayne Mc-Gregor, Toronto Dance Theatre, 45 Degrees, Peggy Baker, Mandeep Raikhy, and Darryl Tracy amongst others.
Prime Movers is a consolidated movement practice that emerged from the synthesis of various movement principles and methods that aims to build awareness of the body and access a dynamic range of embodied possibilities. This ever evolving method was devised by Joshua Sailo from his training and experience working with numerous choreographers, companies and practitioners to enhance the physical training as well as challenge the intellect and creativity of a dancer through playful compositional and theatrical tools.
Diya Naidu
Diya Naidu is a Bangalore based independent artist. She is a contemporary dancer and a choreographer. After about fourteen years working , training amd performing with companies like The Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Rythmosaic and The Danceworx she became independent in 2014.
She has since created solos and ensemble pieces investigating gender, ageing and loss of identity, touch and intimacy to name a few areas of interest. She often uses film, story telling and movement theatre in her work and is invested in immersive as well as large scale proscenium formats. She often works on certain projects for a period of years - changing and revisiting the work as the inner word of the piece changes within her. She believes that the artist is the key site for the integration of worlds and that in this function the movement artist holds a special place - manifesting, processing and anchoring this integration through the alive and moving body.
She collaborated with The Company Theatre to choreograph and star in Khwaab Sa - A Midsummer night's dream. Her piece Rorschach Touch is immersive and intimate and she continues to work on this, it was a deeply human experience for audiences who were impacted by it. Her solo Hands and Face Project has won the Praktiti excellence in contemporary dance Jury award and toured India for the Park festival. She created Red Dress Waali Ladki, another solo in 2015 as a resident artist in Prohelvetia s residency in Zurich and then performed it several times. She is currently working on this again as part of her process of reinvestigating the same topic over time.
She has recently worked in both a virtual and an augmented reality film with Swiss company Cie Gilles Jobin and is part of the currently touring Indo- Swiss collaboration Ef_feminity - a devised work on gender fluidity. She directs the Citizens of Stage Co Lab, a collective of independent dancers based in Bangalore.
Aastha Gulati
Aastha Gulati, is the Artistic Director of Dhurii, has been a professional dancer-choreographer since 2000 and is a versatile dancer having learnt various styles including Kathak, Ballet, Contemporary, Lyrical Jazz, Latin and Belly dance. She has traveled far and wide to places like Broadway Dance Centre, New York, to Thailand integro 2016 for 30 days for flying low and passing through training with David Zambrano, to Edinburgh to train under Tess Letham and under Cristina in dance Italia for one week.
While training and later, she pursued choreography at places like ADAA, New Delhi, where over 7 years, she produced and performed many pieces including a National event at Red Fort, other events at Siri Fort Auditorium, India Habitat Centre etc. She performed for FICCI, Johnny Walker Fashion Week, Indian Oil Corporation etc. She has since then choreographed, performed and taught widely across a wide variety of prominent organisations, stages and countries.
She collates technique with a lot of narrative, expression and experimental movement. Contemporary technique, floor work, cathartic movement etc remain a favorite of hers and her classes will center around them.
Another dimension which always drove Aastha was wellness. Over the last 10 years, she has trained and has certifications on Behaviour therapies and Clinical hypnotherapy in association with CHII, Advance Pranic healing from World Pranic Healing Foundation, Advanced Redikall Healing etc. She is also a certified Corporate Behavioural Trainer and a certified Foundation Thai Massage therapist.
Raam Kumar
A Kalarippayat practitioner, Physical Theater Actor and Contemporary Dancer/ Choreographer. 20 years of experience in performing, 12 years of experience in teaching. Research in different movement vocabularies like Kalarippayat, Yoga and Contemporary dance. Research in body alignment ideas and treatment using Acupressure, Yoga therapy, Chiropractic and Kalari chikilsa.
His classes will comprise of importance to basic voice exercises, physical exercises ( for balance, versatility and increasing body facility), facial expressions and emotional layering. Also we work with different ideas of body preparation and level changes in increasing and decreasing expressions and articulating those expressions.
Kalarippayat: In Kalarippayat we will be working with the basic foot work, animal postures, swings and codified body sequences. Leading onto jumps and fluidity of movement.
Paritosh Sharma
His introduction to Yoga began in the foothills of the Himalayas in 1989. He has been teaching Classical Hatha Yoga for over 20 years. He believes that the only way to experience true well being is to turn inward and Yoga can be a transformational practice towards that truth. He is dedicated to sharing the practice and path of Yoga with deep understanding, empathy and compassion.
Paritosh class of Yoga will help to create a symmetry in the right and left sides of the body, strengthen the core, enhances the ability to balance, asanas and the breathing practices enhance the stamina and endurance, enhances the concentration and help to sleep better.
His Education and Professional background comprises of Introduction to Yoga, Yoga Study Centre, Rishikesh (1996), Diploma in Yoga Education, Kaivalyadham, Lonavala (2003-04), Hatha Yoga Teacher, Kaivalyadham, Lonavala (2003-04), Head of Teacher Training Course, Yogazone, Singapore & Malaysia (2006-12), Hatha Yoga Teacher, a1000Yoga, Bangalore (2015 to 2017)
Parth Bharadwaj
Parth Bharadwaj is a contemporary dance practitioner actively involved in creatiing individual dance work and facilitating technique classes. He has keen focus towards arts education, community arts and is finding ways towards self sustainable methods for individual art/dance practice. He has trained extensively through his association with Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts and engagement with various open workshops and mentors.
His classes works towards finding a deeper connection between breath, spine and finding continuous energy flow. Spirals, floor work, Physical sensations, fall & recovery, speed, dynamism & precision are explored via structured movement phrases. Classes are fundamentally physical, borrowing information from individual movement practice, multiple contemporary techniques and martial arts.
Get In Touch
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476, 10th Main,
JeevanBhima Nagar, Bangalore
India - 560075
E: info@dhurii.com
P: +91 98457 05241