Ankita Sharma
Base Residency Entry Point: Ankita Sharma
Saturday May 11, 2024
Reserve FREE tickets here
Ankita Sharma is an experimental performance artist invested in world-making where content dictates genre and betrays expectation. Their often radical, demanding creations unpack systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in body and mind. In aesthetic, their work is grungy, confrontational, and cheeky, a dance-horror, with physicality rooted in contemporary dance-theater and South Asian and African diasporic forms. For Ankita, performance audiences are agentive, sitting with and challenging discomfort in environments where sophistication and blasphemy collide.
Ankita's work has been shown at venues across the US, including Denver Art Museum, Dixon Place, Abrons Arts Center, JACK, Ormao, The Basement, The Tank, Chelsea Factory, University Settlement, and LaGuardia Performing Arts. Currently in residence at BASE and GALLIM, they have previously received support from Performance Project, ECS, LEIMAY, Crown-Goodman, and more. They hold degrees in Dance and Anthropology and have trained under artists such as Eiko Otake, Rosy Simas, Sorah Yang, Rennie Harris, Hofesh Shetcher, and Pallavi Sriram. In their spare time, they manage several award-winning dance-theater companies, including Sleep No More.
[Image Description: a smoky image where they gaze mischievously at the camera with a soft smirk playing at their lips. They wear a deep green, textured, leathery blazer and have short black hair, highlighted with brown, and shaved at the sides.They sit in front of a brown background, one arm bent, so their hand grazes the back of their neck.]
Photo provided by Bee Lively Photography
[Image Description: A seething, icy performance image from dhoka/Betrayal/. Ankita, playing Kali, gazes coldly out into the distance while adorned with a heavy beaded necklace, a leathery gladiator skirt, and black knee pads. They gesture with one hand's thumb raised and the other flat out in front of their body. Blood runs down their forehead and dribbles from their mouth. Behind them, a man in a black kurta kneels, bloodied hands in a prayer.]
Photo provided by Samovar Film Productions