Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist and educator who is shaped by her somatic experiences as a refugee. Her practice takes on an alchemical process of distilling symbolic representations into messengers of liminal spaces. She creates objects, installations, and audience participatory scores with interest in liminal spaces experienced by the viewer-participant, while her sound performances and compositions make use of her voice and innate properties of everyday objects as an ether for direct communication in an otherwise disparate circumstance of image.

Rachel Austin is a queer performer, songwriter and composer. A deconstructionist, Austin’s recent works have focused on disassembling whiteness and majority culture experiences through songwriting and prose. Playfulness-as-liberation is at the centre of her practice.

Danielle Galvez (she/her) is a first-generation filipina-american daughter of immigrants. Dani (for short) is a dancer for pateldanceworks, an artist for Archive Dance Collective, movement researcher with Responsive Body, and youth educator based in the Bay Area. Her curiosity rests in “code switching” within movement spaces and finding the thread that relates all dancers and movers interconnected.

Daria Garina arrived in the Bay as a 6-year-old refugee from Moscow, Russia. His movement work explores displacement, chronic illness, being transgender, and mixed race.

Bhumi B Patel is a queer, desi artist/activist who creates intersectionally feminist performances from a trauma informed, social justice-oriented perspective. Patel uses dance as a pursuit for liberation and decolonization. She creates movement outside of white models of dance but wants you to know that some of her best friends are white.

About This Work

to leave the land, a project of divisions the empire has sown is a dance theater piece examining the violence of forced migration. Informed by the British occupation of South Asia, this work will be performed by Danielle Galvez, Daria Garina, and Bhumi Patel with sound design by Rachel Austin in collaboration with Sholeh Asgary.

The evening will include movement, storytelling, sonic landscape, and immersive experience, asking the audience to become part of the performance itself. With to leave the land we open conversations about past and present colonization to empower audiences to dismantle inequitable social structures. The violence endured within our lineages is part of these queer bodies and we seek to hold and heal these stories of lost homelands and lost lives.