She, Fugitive, Nebula

Join award-winning choreopoet and Postgraduate Researcher Safiya Kamaria for a performance at RJC Dance in Leeds.

3 Acts, 2 Women, 1 Night.

She, Fugitive, Nebula is an interdisciplinary solo choreopoem in three acts, emerging from Safiya Kamaria's doctoral project’s enquiry into Black Barbadian women’s embodied living histories.

Through dance, poetry, film and visual art, it curates the project’s critical and creative concepts into a live theatrical form.

This is a PhD examination performance.

Venue

RJC Dance
The Mandela Centre
Chapeltown Road
Leeds LS7 3HY

Book your place

Please RSVP here if you would like to attend.

 

About the doctoral project

She, Fugitive, Nebula emerged from Safiya Kamaria's doctoral fieldwork undertaken in Barbados, where her methodology dialogues-in-dance was developed as a movement-based method for engaging Black Barbadian women’s lived experiences. Through improvised dance the research attends to movement as a form of knowledge, memory, and embodied cultural analysis. The fieldwork took place across every day and public spaces, allowing dance to be encountered not only as a part of social life.

By centring Black Barbadian women’s movement practices the project challenges the marginalisation of their embodied lives within Caribbean historiography and dance scholarship. It asks what becomes possible when movement is treated as a critical method through which historical experience, cultural thought, and lived reality can be approached. 

About Safiya

Safiya Kamaria is a WRoCAH-funded doctoral researcher in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.

She is an award-winning choreopoet whose work braids dance, poetry and Black diasporic history on page and stage. In 2020, she received The New Voice in Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for both the Out-Spoken Page Poetry Prize and the Creative Future Writer’s Award.

Her debut poetry collection, Cane, Corn & Gully (2022), was shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize and the Felix Dennis Forward Prize for Best First Collection. It also won Barbados’ 2023 ‘Gine On’ People’s Choice Award for Best Book.

Her work has appeared in journals including POETRY, Callaloo, Wasafiri, Poetry London, and The Caribbean Writer. Safiya is the first alumna of the Obsidian Foundation.

Feature image

Safiya Kamaria. Photo by Sam Mackenzie.