Sarah Aiken
About
Sarah Aiken is a Melbourne-based teacher and choreographer from Bellingen NSW. Sarah’s work investigates assemblage, authorship, scale and the self, looking at the roles of audience, performer, subject and object and connecting tangibly with audiences, to consider performance as a site for empathy & exchange. Sarah is co-director of Deep Soulful Sweats, working with Rebecca Jensen to create work that engages rigorously with participation, waste and a reckless formalism, recycling content to consider materiality and how we come together. Sarah is an active contributor to the dance sector across Australia, organising with and advocating for a broad community of dance artists, movers and makers.
Sarah has presented work nationally and internationally including Dance Massive, Arts Centre Melbourne, Castlemaine State Festival, Dancehouse (Housemate Resident XIV), The Substation/LGI, Keir Choreographic Awards (finalist 2014 & 2016), VCA, Brisbane Festival, PICA, Ian Potter Museum, Immigration Museum, Les Plateaux de la Briqueterie (Paris), and Dancemakers Toronto. Sarah is an Australia Council artist in resident at HIAP, Helsinki and is developing new works for video across live and digital platforms.
Experimental Micro-Fellowship 2021
Sarah’s experimental Micro Fellowship sees her breaking new ground at the intersection of her performance and video practice—expanding her technical and conceptual use of video and wedding technology with corporality: considering the body as an assemblage, as a landscape for microscopic life, as singular, as one of many, as a multitude, as a tool for change, both destructive and generative, and as temporary. This investigation of the body traces imagined histories of our matter before and after our ownership of it. The resulting video experiments imagine surreal bodies contaminated by each cells previous encounters, revealing indeterminate and multidirectional histories.
