Improvisers Exchange Workshop: Anida Yoeu Ali – Performance for Non-Dancers

Anida Yoeu Ali

Performance for Non-Dancers:

Performance is doing, being, acting and dancing. This workshop is designed for participants who do not necessarily identify as dancers and/or who have minimal or no experience with performance. In this studio-based workshop, we will learn how to hone presence and transform ordinary gestures into creative extraordinary performances. Participants will grow their awareness and appreciation of movement in all its diverse forms as well as their ability to communicate through non-verbal expression. We will learn to select, develop, and perform everyday human actions into dancelike movement and/or performance action. We will explore our emotional, intellectual, and kinesthetic selves while learning the elements that make up performance: time, space and energy.

Anida Yoeu Ali (b. 1974, Battambang, Cambodia) is an interdisciplinary artist whose works span performance, installation, new media, public encounters, and political agitation. Born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago, she is a first-generation American of mixed Malay, Cham, Khmer, and Thai ancestries. Working transnationally, Ali investigates the artistic, spiritual, and political collisions of her diasporic, hybrid identity with the resolve that in-betweenness is a powerful space for creation and provocation. Ali believes performance allows for a magic of reinventing the self and projecting “larger-than-life” personas liberated from oppressive representations. Currently based in Tacoma, Ali is also the co-founder of Studio Revolt, an independent artist-run media lab whose works have agitated the White House, won awards at film festivals, and redefined what it means to create sans studio and trans-nomadically. Ali’s works have been acquired by public and private collections and globally exhibited, including at Haus der Kunst, Palais de Tokyo, the Smithsonian, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, and Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design. A recipient of the 2024 Arts Innovator Award, 2020 Art Matters Fellowship and the 2015 Sovereign Asian Art Prize from Hong Kong, she received her MFA from School of the Art Institute Chicago. Ali’s artworks are included in several private collections and public collections. As an educator, she serves as a Senior Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington Bothell, and as an artist, she works between the Asia-Pacific region and the US.

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