Dubai is a plastic city! There are no arts and culture in Dubai! Everything is fake! It’s not a creative city! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this in the first few months after I shifted to Dubai. Listen too much, and I’d probably turn right around and leave, golden visa or…
Almost any choreographer will tell you that finding the right music for dance is the hardest part. Unless you have the great fortune to work with a composer or are creating for a specific song, finding that exact piece of music that matches your concept can be maddening. It used to be something I dreaded….
We’ve all seen those amazing dance photographs – high extensions, flowing clothes, unreal shapes as they jump. But then you go to the studio to take your own pictures, and somehow, it’s not at all the same. The postures aren’t as strong, the shapes aren’t clear. What’s going on?? And how can you get those…
Since the pandemic, more and more performing arts are going online. However, filming dance requires a fundamentally different approach than performing it live. I would even suggest that dance films are almost a whole other medium, as it requires thinking more like a filmmaker than a performer. That is, at least, what I learned when…
When I lived in Seoul, I trained and performed with a company that regularly worked with disabled dancers, and helped coordinate one of their initiatives, the Korea International Accessible Dance Festival. Here in Pakistan, I’ve done a few projects with differently abled dancers, in particular More Than My Gender and multiple collaborations with visual and…
In a few past blogs I’ve pointed fingers at the more disappointing areas of the dance industry. It’s a bit strange that dance, unlike other art industries, has sort of avoided deeper scrutiny into its more unjust and discriminatory practices. Of course criticism does exist, and the academic field of dance studies has turned its…
I used to joke that if you are an artist, you’ll have an existential crisis at least once every six months. It’s not really that funny, though, because it’s so true, and depending on how things are going I might have several crises in a much shorter timeframe. I think for an artist, questions like…
Once you start working professionally you’ll start hearing about the branding. You need to have a brand, be a brand, brand yourself, blah blah blah. If you’re not tired of it already, you will be soon! It can be very challenging to try and figure out how to represent yourself as a business. This is…
I’m sure there are many people who are a bit confused by the genre of performance art, which can range from the baffling to the bizarre and everything in between. Sometimes it seems to overlap with performing arts in some way, and sometimes it’s on its own planet altogether. There is, however, a clear difference,…
It should not come as a surprise that dance and contemporary dance, while often seen or celebrated as a connecting feature of humanity, has been used for colonial purposes. Whether that’s controlling who dances and why in colonized countries or ongoing barriers around who can do what style, it’s really only in the past couple…