Announcing Programs with Parijat Desai & Alyssa Gregory!

We made a soft announcement at our winter town halls; here’s the official news! 
 

CHICAGO, IL, MAY 5 - Soham Dance Space celebrates and amplifies Parijat Desai and Alyssa Gregory through new pilot programs. Centering South Asian and Black dance artists, Soham Dance Space experiments with new models for artist-presenter and artist-producer relationships. Led by Artistic Director Anjal Chande, Soham launches these programs in order to invest in the broader ecosystem of artists, amplify critical conversations, and implement artist-centered platforms of support. Thanks to a successful community fundraiser, each program will receive $10,000 and prioritize deep, nuanced engagement with the participating artists.

Pilot #1: The Artist-in-Residence program aims to uplift, complicate, and reframe South Asian dance in the diaspora. This initiative emerged from reflections on the absence of producers and presenters who are able to appreciate the wide range of aesthetics and motivations of South Asian artists. Too often, artists face a degree of tokenization, a shallow, over-simplified engagement with their work, or an inability to foreground personal, idiosyncratic relationships with form and identity. This program disrupts prevalent paradigms and spotlights the multiplicity of South Asian contemporary practices. Our inaugural artist Parijat Desai, based in New York City (Lenape land), will produce a series of events examining garba, healing, caste, and nationalism!

Pilot #2: The Producing Partnership program aims to uplift and amplify Black voices and dreams in Chicago (Odawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi land). Through a lens of solidarity, interconnectedness, and equity, Soham Dance Space aims to prioritize the needs of Black dance artists. We believe artists of color must come together to fight cultural hegemony and white supremacy, and we want to build on legacies of Black-Desi solidarity through a spirit of camaraderie in the arts sector. We will support one Black artist’s project in 2021 as a co-producer, and our inaugural artist, Alyssa Gregory, is already underway producing The Process Podcast! 

We are honored these artists have chosen Soham as a home for developing their work this year!