Matrixia Moya
Performance Rituals, (w)Rites and Research
Deepening Transpersonal and Ecological Connections
Relational Ocean Wisdom
Ongoing Projects
Seaweed and Sustainability in South India
In conversation with different stake holders, we look at the development of seaweed economies in South India, and we consider how ritual and food-based creative interventions, which are community-engaged and ecologically sustainable, may potentially meet different needs.
Project leaders: Dr. Manola Gayatri Kumarswamy and Dr. Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar.
Kanchi and the Ocean's Bellow
A play about Kanchi, a mixed race gender fluid character, who after a break up with their partner, goes on a journey of queer-feminist bonding and surprising ancestral anthropomorphic connection by the coast. Other important characters include linguist friend Dikeledi, Dikeledi’s grandmother Gogamma, Pinto- a mysterious cafe owner and a pod of sperm whales.
Queer feminist interest in traditionally female sea divers in South Asia and South East Asia dovetail into ancestral ocean connections with personal genealogies and become characters in this play, as well as a recognition of whales as our ancestral mammalian connection to our own origins from the waters. Experiments with visual artist Sibu Masters on rethinking anthropomorphic performance visuality through post-furries and prosthesis will be explored. Popular interest in whale watching, sea diving and ocean research is both critiqued and explored as a metaphor for problematics of research and art. It also opens up artistic collaborative research as a third space besides consuming and being consumed.
Project Leaders: Dr. Manola Gayatri Kumarswamy and Dr. Sharon Lopez.
Workshops and Short Term Courses
Grounding and Self-care Workshop
Taking care of oneself includes emotional regulation, reflection, activity and rest. This 3 day workshop includes interactive sessions, experiential learning and rest amidst Nature and farming at MMK Farms in Bangalore to enable insight and space to create a personal practice of care. Residential Workshop.
Theatre & Ecology
Centred around ecological relationality with the performer's body and the environment, this short course draws on Performance as Research, Rasaesthetics, Environmental Philosophy and Creative Writing to develop a sensitive, well informed and multi-skilled environmental interventionist. Hybrid learning mode.
Food, Embodiment & Ecology
Food, Embodiment & Ecology
Connecting the importance of body- understood as embodiment, food and nutrition, ecology, climate and season- this unique course engages with an interdisciplinary praxis, required for building sustainable health, ethical ecological relationships and emotional resilience. 6 week online course.
Performance as Research Work
ChoreoKelp
A series of embodied acts in the kelp forests of the Western Cape, South Africa resonating with Asberg’s concept of kelping and more recent findings of whale kelping by marine biologists.
Supported by: Postdoc Fellowship Witwatersrand and ARA Melon Staff Grant for Artistic Research 2021.
mince-n-dreams
Two psychodynamic oriented food performance acts at the Mthubi Arts Hub, 'an occupied post apartheid arts space' in Pretoria carried out during the Fees Must Fall students movement processing agency and bodily vulnerability. Emerging themes from the work included friendship, vulnerability and spatial justice were explored in a seminar presentation at the University of Pretoria's Capitol Cities Conference in Pretoria in 2017.
Breath and Touch in Cross-Cultural Artistic Research
The JourneyWomxn, a decolonial poetic and pedagogic figure wRites herself as the eco-self in a postdecolonial gesture.
Emerging themes from this project included decolonial grief, ecological loss and emerging hybrid subjectivities from the shadowed 'Other'. This performance as research exploration had different outputs including a 'Performance Poetry Imbizo' (Shooonya, Bangalore 2017), a video work 'oko: the spirit of empty wells' and a seminar paper at the International Federation of Theatre Research Conference in Belgrade 2018.
JourneyWomxn and the Whale Matrixia
Tracking the JourneyWomxn as decolonial poetic and pedagogic figure whose mediatised and mediated encounters with with whales and BodyDreaming leads the emergence of the eco-self.
The artistic project is a performance and writing based creative work, which uses 'the Oceans', 'Fluidity', 'Queer Desire' as it’s material, conceptual and sensory impulses, leading to to consider a formulation of decolonial ethics in queer artistic research i.e. ’connection without consumption and the gruesome love of eating the other’ while also exploring and experimenting with desire and eros as a force in research. Doctoral work on breath in performance is transmuted into apnea breath work in the water through initial discoveries.