Ashvini Sundaram & Yui Ugai

Description
We began our choreographic research for this work at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity which sits on the grounds of Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain. This known sacred place supported our research into the meaning of home. By accessing our embodied memories of land, place and ancestry, we dug into our own associations of “home.” Where is home between Toronto and Hiroshima? Where is home between Singapore and Thanjavur? This search led us to explore triangularity within our layered cultural identities. Living in our own intersections, we embark on a journey of remembering what we have forgotten. Instead of tethering ourselves to new, shared elements of home, we confront the past: can we remember who we once were as one people?

Choreographer | Creator Name: Ashvini Sundaram & Yui Ugai

Composer: Diego Marulanda

Performers Name(s): Ashvini Sundaram & Yui Ugai

Dramaturgy: Anita La Selva

Outside Eye: Anita La Selva and Gitanjali Kolanad

Costume Designers: Cindy Chang & Cathy Xu

Ashvini Sundaram
Ashvini Sundaram (BSc, MFA) is a Singaporean-Canadian dance artist. She received bharatanatyam training under the multi-award-winning dance artist, Rama Vaidyanathan, who is well-known for her contemporary choreographies within the traditional canon. Ashvini’s work aims to address topics related to ancestral knowledge systems and diasporic identity. Her choreographic research called “Art of Time” examines "cyclical time" as seen in the Indian classical music system to transcend normative framings of time, body, and presence as seen in Western scholarship and dance writing. In Dec 2022, Ashvini was a selected participant in the Dance Artists in Residence program at The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity to examine how tradition lives in the body and what embodied relationships exist to land, ancestry, and togetherness.

Yui Ugai
Yui Ugai (BFA, MFA) was born in Hiroshima, Japan. She has danced and toured nationally and internationally with The Toronto Blue Jays, Skindivers, Limitless Productions, The Parahumans, Little Pear Garden Dance Company, Ballet Creole, Kashe Dance Company, Kaeja d’Dance, Anima Inc. (Mexico/Peru) and several other Toronto-based dance companies. Yui’s independent research involves examining traditional Japanese performing art forms and what it means to her body in the discovery of her own corporeal being as Japanese-Canadian. Yui received several awards including a Dora Mayor Moore Awards Nomination, W. Lawrence Heisey Graduate Award in Fine Arts, and Hiroshima Cultural Foundation Scholarship in Arts.

Instagram: @_ashvinisundaram | @yuiugai