S A R A T A N

After receiving my Bachelor’s degree in Dance from the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point (UWSP) in the United States of America (Magna cum Laude), I went on to attend the contemporary dance school in Brussels – Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (P.A.R.T.S) where I now intervene as their rhythm teacher.

I worked for a number of years with the Brussels-based choreographer, Michele Noiret, on 3 different creations, the first of which was a re-make of her seminal solo from 1989 entitled 'Vertebre'. Prior to that, I had spent some years with the French company, Kubilai Khan Investigations. I have also had the pleasure of being an interprete for Maria Hassabi, Eszter Salamon, Leila Ka, Eric Minh-Cuong Castaing (Cie Shonen), Thierry de Mey, David Drouard (Cie DADR), Youness Aboulakhoul, Christian and Francois Ben Aim, David Hernandez, Anne-Linn Akselsen (Human Works), Isabella Soupart, Harris Gkekas and Serena Malacco.

My artistic practice, if I can humbly say I possess one, has come out of almost a decade of my working in the dance field as a dancer, performer, collaborator, and my favourite of term, an interprete. This is my preferred of terms because I find that it speaks the most closely to the process of first entering the studio, listening to the choreographer speak about his/her vision, allowing the content and emotions of the words spoken to sink in, whether deeply or superficially, and allowing myself – mind, body, and soul – to interpret and translate those words into movement, gestures or other types of vernacular.

There is a kind of surrender that is required, which I'm learning to be more and more at ease with, where in a selfless manner of creative brainstorming, ideas get proposed, kept or thrown away, all for the greater good, so to speak. Diving in wholeheartedly and trusting the process, are tenets by which I approach my work as an artist in the role of collaborator, as I take active part in helping a choreographer's vision reveal itself, one step at a time.

I have had the wonderful privilege of working with a plethora of choreographers with approaches and styles as different as they come. And each project I've had the chance to be a part of stays with me and informs all future projects I enter into. Like a greater artist at work upon me, each project chisels away at me and creates new facets, angles and folds in my dancing body, my understanding, my embodied knowledge etc., only to reveal a continually complexifying individual, always in the process of learning and perhaps more significantly, unlearning.

Where above I paid homage to la danse, I here want to do the same for le danseur/ la danseuse. The precious work we do as intermediaries may often be overshadowed or taken for granted, as we willingly surrender to the ultimate vision of the artist with whom we work for and with. And yet, we are more than just the clay, yarn, wood or paint which the artist manipulates or plays with – we are both object and subject with a whole range of creative agency. Having had the experience of working with dancers who know how to delicately traverse this boundary where the self does not always have a balanced place to settle upon, is inspiring and humbling, and I aim to learn from such examples.

The self, which dance, in my case, allows me to gain a more refined understanding of, is balanced with the self born from a practice of non-preciousness, where this self is allowed to die many deaths in order to bring new birth of something/someone, as yet unknown, only then to die again and reinvent itself. Yet, the new territories roamed only serve to carve, even deeper, the original self from which these treks were made. And so, there is simultaneously a wandering and deepening of the source, both of which can only happen in function of one another.

2027

5,6 January – Petty Bison / STUK, Leuven (BE)

11 February – Petty Bison / Roeselare (BE)

19,20 February – Us / Vienna (AT)

24 February – Petty Bison / Aarschot (BE)

16 March – Tendre Colere / Le Perreux-Sur-Marne (FR)

18 March – Petty Bison / Turnhout (BE)

19 March – Petty Bison / Deinze (BE)

20 April – Petty Bison / Geel (BE)

23 April – Petty Bison / Koksijde (BE)

24 April – Petty Bison / Merelbeke (BE)

2026

22 january – Petty Bison / Aalst (BE)

7 February – Petty Bison / Rosas Festival, Brussels (BE)

17-19 May – Us Premiere / Bozar (BE)

6 June – Petty Bison / Mechelen (BE)

19,20 June – p/\rc / Festival de Marseille (FR)

22,23 July – Us / Athens Epidaurus Festival (GR)

6 November – New Creation (Leila Ka) / Cavaillon (FR)

November and December – French tour with Leila Ka