Sonia Soney (23) is a contemporary artist/dancer who graduated from the Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, Bangalore. She is trained in contemporary dance, basics of ballet, kalaripayattu, bharatanatyam, hip-hop, chauu and has worked under many national and international choreographers.
Art helps people heal, realise and learn a lot about the self, and at the same time question the conditioning process that society puts an individual’s body and mind through. Using art to converse with the spectators helping them/making them realise the capabilities of the body in all its physical and mental forms and various senses has been a primary goal.
Who decides what is beautiful? Who decides what is ugly? Sonia’s work aims to break the stereotype with respect to toxic standards, with regard to gender, body type, mentalities and so on. She looks forward to a peaceful and harmonious world, helping open doors to humanity through movement art.
A dance residency quite in the middle of the pandemic, in one of the safe time slots was definitely an interesting experience as a movement artist. To begin with, there was so much room and personal space to explore, understand and experience the cultural difference, the pattern of patriarchal changes since history in the region, the history of strong women in Düsseldorf, and so on. As a choreographer my work is influenced by what women have to put up with on a daily basis, due to the patriarchal conditioning and structures.
Recently my focus has shifted to explore how I can relate and translate my work to the cishet male audience, which is something I reflected on during the time of the residency. So many feminist performances, but an increased number of men don't relate, when compared to the other genders. This is the challenge I am willing to work on. To dissolve barriers and find that connect and balance as a performer.
Understanding and translating the human body, its experience and its being beyond the gender binary is something I wish to research and focus on in the future as well. I aim to take this work to the public, in public places makingit more inclusive to a wider audience, who haven't had the opportunity to know this side of art and its potential. Inviting healing, unlearning and relearning, opening our wired minds to new beautiful perspectives. Texts, research, real life stories and experiences, subjectivity of art, human behavioural patterns, theatre influence my choreographic process and performances.
My recent work PURPOSE, that I presented during my bangaloREsidency-Expanded@Weltkunstzimmer is a work that's highly influenced by stories of people who have been hard hit by the patriarchal structure in their lives. By bringing their stories to stage I ask for change and necessary shifts needed in society. This time through elements of irony,sarcasm and teeny tiny bit of humour, maybe or maybe not. The movement vocabulary of the piece has been developed from the writings and texts and draws its inspiration from the poem "Still I rise" by Maya Angelou.
