Artist Talk: Tania El Khoury, Abby Zbikowski, + Sanchita Sharma

Abby Z and the New Utility Tania El Khoury
Presented in partnership with Origin Studio House

SATURDAY APRIL 13th: Artist Talk with Tania El Khoury, Abby Zbikowski, + Sanchita Sharma

Invisible Borders: Conversation about border and body politics in the work of artists Tania El Khoury and Abby Zbikowski

Join Fusebox & Origin Studio House for the Fusebox Festival 2024 Artist Talks happening daily from 12:30pm -1:30pm starting Wednesday April 10th through Saturday April 14th.

Each day will bring new artists and creatives, both local and international, who will sit down and share their projects, processes, and passions. Come take your lunch break with us at Origin Studio House where there will be beverages and food for sale as we dive into what makes our community of artists tick.

Sanchita Sharma is a performing artist, choreographer, and a dance scholar from New Delhi, India. She is trained as a jazz, modern, and contemporary dancer, and has performed extensively across India, China, Scotland, and the United States. She is a PhD Candidate at UCLA in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where she studies the politics of corporeal dissent in Indian contemporary dance. Currently based in Austin, Sanchita is teaching at the Austin Community College (ACC) as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Dance and is dancing with the local community.

In her creative research, Sanchita envisions the construction of a performance as a shared experience between performers, objects, space, and the audience. Her choreographic work has been shown at ACC’s 7th Annual Faculty and Guest Artist Concert and First Street Studio (Austin), The Broad Art Center (UCLA), Natya Ballet Center and Gati Dance Forum (New Delhi), and Maya Dance Theatre (Singapore), among others. Her dance film, Engage, was awarded the “Best Dance Film” in Seoul International Short Film Festival (2021) and officially selected at several festivals across New York, Austin, and Germany.

Choreographer Abby Zbikowski created Abby Z and the New Utility in 2012 with dancers Fiona Lundie and Jennifer Meckley to experiment with the potential and choreographic possibility of the body being pushed beyond perceived limits, creating a new movement lexicon that triangulates dancing/moving bodies across multiple cultural value systems simultaneously. In 2016, Abby expanded to a group of nine performer/collaborators for Zbikowski’s first evening length commission. abandoned playground premiered to a sold-out run at the Abrons Arts Center in New York in April 2017, leading to Zbikowski being honored with the Juried Bessie Award. Abby Z and the New Utility have been presented at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Boston ICA, 92nd St Y, Movement Research at Danspace Project, Gibney Dance Center, The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, and the Fusebox Festival in Austin,TX, among others. From diverse training and cultural backgrounds, Abby Z and the New Utility works collaboratively to build a hybrid form that welcomes audiences from a range of understandings of dance/movement and reflects a wider contemporary cultural conversation.

Tania El Khoury is a live artist whose work focuses on audience interactivity and its political potential. She creates installations and performances in which the audience is a witness and an active collaborator. Tania’s work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 32 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of a Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award.

Tania is the director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College in New York. She holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is associated with Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK and is a co-founder of Dictaphone Group in Lebanon, a research and live art collective aiming at questioning our relationship to the city and its public spaces.