Critical Path, with Performance Space, is thrilled to announce Devika Bilimoria as the recipient of the 2023 Experimental Choreographic Residency!
Based in Naarm, Devika is a multi-disciplinary artist working across performance, video, photography, and installation. They utilise chance, participation, and practices of listening to reveal socio-cultural formations of separateness, hierarchies, and gesture. Trained in the South Indian dance from Bharatanatyam, as well as Media Studies at RMIT and Fine Arts (honours) from the VCA, Devika creates works that are shared in galleries, on stages and in digital and site-specific contexts, with an aim to reorient what is given and stimulate unexpected encounters and temporalities.
Devika will be in the Drill Hall from 11 – 21 April, collaborating with a number of POC artists, developing a new work based on the theme of ‘Gesture-share’ — a large-scale live performance installation that surges their practice-based research of chance and ritual, through the framework of a task-based game with tactile material engagement.
The work builds on Devika’s recent durational performance-installation ‘Offerings’ and explores randomisation as a key choreographic agent to disorient, jumble, and reveal embodied hierarchies and social prescriptions of dominant worshipping patterns archived within the artists bodies—to reimagine what is given.
“I use chance-based methods such as randomisation, event scores, improvisation, gravity, and the entropy of duration to facilitate an explicit and implicit witnessing of shifts within the performing body. This experimental practice of indeterminacy, play and disorientation creates an unorthodox approach not only to choreography but to the access of cultural and historic embodiments that shimmer in a diasporic body, while embracing the absurdity and failure of the unknown through chance methods.” (Devika Bilimoria)
For more about Devika’s project, read this conversation with them from April 2023, while they were in the Drill Hall.
ABOUT EXPERIMENTAL CHOREOGRAPHIC RESIDENCY
The Experimental Choreographic Residency (ECR) supports the development of innovative, bold and experimental approaches to choreography. Established in 2016 in partnership with Performance Space, the residency supports an artist or collaboration to spend two weeks developing their experimental choreographic practice with financial, production, technical and creative support from both organisations.
PAST ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
- 2023: Devika Bilimoria
- 2022: Brooke Stamp
- 2021: Rebecca Jenson
- 2020: Nat Randall and Anna Breckon
- 2019: Ivey Wawn
- 2018: Rajni Shah
- 2017: Atlanta Eke
- 2016: Justin Shoulder and Victoria Hunt
Image: by Renee-Stamatis