cirkus
sanya launches cirkus in 2024 in an attempt to differentiate their creative practice. It refers to sanya’s past and future independent work.
cirkus aims to become a creative platform that demystifies the art form through collaborative efforts with like-minded people. The frontier between the everyday self and the performing dance artist can dissipate.
With a focus on exploring new ways of presenting movement, stimulating discursive research, and refusing norms, cirkus can reimagine dance. In cirkus lies a commitment to initiating change in the dance industry and fostering a legacy of equity and ethical standards.
creating experience
creating experience
brain(s), in collaboration with Marianne Raynal
(january - june 2023)
brain(s) is a hybrid, hyper-visual contemporary dance piece. It presents itself as an eerie, contemplative experience for both dancers and viewers.
“We can never escape our bodily envelopes, nor disconnect from the objects of our direct thoughts and feelings. It seems individuals sense the world independently from one another, yet we don’t know how exactly. Different levels of existence might be overlapping.”
The work invites audiences to reflect on existential perception while combining movement, creative make-up, and fashion on a modulating musical soundscape. Bodies merge in expressive garments, poetically depicting life occurrences.
Sanya presents brain(s) as part of Resolution 2023 at The Place as well as inklingroom’s debut in Bristol.
dancers/collaborators. Sanya Malnar and Marianne Raynal.
photography. Elly Welford.
rencontres(en)nous, essentially researching ourselves
(september - june 2022)
rencontres(en)nous is an immersive performance Sanya created as part of their third-year independent research project at Trinity Laban. The piece considers the phenomenological implications of their conception of essence, via the presentation of improvised movement, film, and photographs, featuring original costume and make-up designs. Sanya invites the audience to follow their own interests and to move freely through the whole of the exhibition space, allowing the work to be witnessed from a plurality of perspectives.
“In my mind, everyone and everything has an essence – a way of being in sorts – that could resemble a non-conformative sense of identity. Throughout my subjective perception of life, I have always felt as though each individual thing had an essence of its own that allowed it to exist, necessarily and not accidentally. I believe that this essence is most easily perceivable in everyday functional actions, natural ways of moving and reacting, patterns, and such. It also appears clearly in small-scale decision-making, for instance in choices made when practicing arts and crafts. This sense of self is always present no matter what we do. Furthermore, sensing my essence as well as the essence of others is something I have been doing rather unconsciously in the past, sometimes associating those with attributes like colours, shapes, and feels. According to essentialism, essences are infinite and cannot ever be described in their totality.”
dancers. Ruby De Ville Morel, Benedetta Leso, Andrea Louca, Sanya Malnar, Margherita Massarotti, Maea Morgan, Giulia Quacqueri, Vida Sjoquist, Akari Takahashi, and Olivia Thompson.
costume. Marysa Ciach.
film. Maxi McLachlan.
photography. Sophie Holden, Adam Lin, and Adam Pietraszewski.
supervisor. Kate Johnson.
The Three Languages, in collaboration with Marysa Ciach
(may 2021)
The Three Languages is a fashion project led by Marysa Ciach. Sanya interprets Nature and takes part in a series of performances based on an improvisational score associating fashion and dance to the narration of a fairytale.
artistic direction/costume. Marysa Ciach @ ual: university of the arts london.
film. Maxi McLachlan.
dancers. Sanya Malnar, Adele Diridollou, and Emer Dineen.
“When Chaos ruled the world, there was still nothing. There was no order and it was not known what is good or what is evil, what is beautiful or what can be ugly. Then three goddesses emerged from the vastness of its waters. They were Beauty, Strength and Nature. Beauty aroused admiration and generated desire. Strength was shrewd as a snake and as innocent as a dove. Nature was the most kind and caring but also the most vulnerable of them all. When Chaos started to have these three greatest ideas - the idea of Beauty, Strength and Nature, it began to organize itself. Then, the Man was born. The world was prepared and good for him at first. Nature gave him strength and a sense of beauty. He drew models for his art form, painting the first buffalos and mammoths hunting in caves, weaving the first patterns on canvases, making the first clothes, carving the very first sculptures and making the first tools. Man drew all his strength from Strength when he set out on hunting, he began to cultivate the field, and when he struggled to survive, Beauty taught him wisdom. As long as he believed in them, they gave him shelter and allowed him to create the world anew every day. In harmony with them all.
But Man finally turned his back on Nature and decided to destroy it. In his pride he believed that he was so all-powerful that he could reign without her, and that he would be a grantee ruler of the whole world when he destroys Nature and establishes his own order. He no longer needed Nature, he believed that he would create his own world without it. He did not know, however, that it was Nature that gave him strength and was the only source of beauty. When he started to fight her, he was slowly losing his strength and stopped understanding beauty. The more he fights with Nature, the les strength he has left. The more Nature is destroyed, the less Beauty can impart to her own works that are getting uglier and uglier. If he does not restore nature to its place, if it does not slowly bloom again, he will lose all its strength and will cease to see beauty. He will plunge into the dark depths of chaos and die.”
