SOFTLAMP.autonomies TRAILER from Malik Nashad Sharpe on Vimeo.

Co-creators and performers: Ellen Furey, Malik Nashad Sharpe
Dramaturgy/outside eye: Dana Michel
Lights: Paul Chambers

Ellen Furey is a choreographer based in Montreal working in experimental and contemporary dance forms. Since 2012, she’s mostly involved in collaborative, discursive processes that insist on a mess of subjectivities. Her work uses potentials of dance virtuosities and performer type showmanship as material for living, oblique rebellion, and debate, entangled with heavy ambiguity. She works with, for, and alongside independent artists including Dana Michel, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Andrew Tay, Christopher Willes, and Simon Portigal and has performed in choreographies by Daniel Léveillé Danse, Frédérick Gravel, Marten Spangberg (SE), Tina Tarpgaard (DE), Sasha Kleinplatz and Clara Furey. Ellen is a 2014 recipient of a DanceWeb scholarship, ImpulsTanz, Vienna, was a part of mobile academy-Berlin’s Copycat Academy 2015, and is currently a part-time, independent student at Concordia University. Her work has been presented in France, Canada, and the UK.

Malik Nashad Sharpe (b.1992, New York) is an artist working with choreographic propositions, dance textures, and systems of meaning production. Their performances extend the possibilities of aesthetics, affect, and allostatic load with the belief that the advent of performance is critical to claims for freedom and futurity. Their works utilise dance and choreography to create conditions, ideologies, rituals, and practices that unfurl and call forth ulterior desires and potentials for another world for the othered body. Looking at and beyond strictures of essentialism, identity, and humanity, their works often value the undercurrent and the subterranean, maintaining an ontological commitment to the autonomies of the racialised and gendered body.

They regularly make work and perform under their stage alias, marikiscrycrycry, a long term choreographic engagement with the alterity, ambiguity, and an emotional aesthetics of blackness and queerness that relies on dancing and live action. Their work has been presented internationally and across the U.K. including at venues like Hackney Showroom, Marlborough Theatre, The Yard Theatre, Theatre La Chapelle, Menagerie de Verre, Theatre in the Mill, Quarterhouse, Tate Britain, South London Gallery, Gate Theatre/English National Opera, National Theatre, CCA Glasgow, amongst many others. They have taught dance and choreographic practice at institutions like Glasgow School of Art, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, School of New Dance Development, Goldsmiths, Tate Modern, London School of Contenporary Dance and more. They are currently artist-in-residence at Tate Britain, an Associate Artist at Hackney Showroom, and an artist bursary scheme recipient at ArtsAdmin. They make work from their base in South London, UK.