Who's who
Malaika Sarco-Thomas
Award Leader, Dance
Malaika
Sarco-Thomas, MALS, MA, is a dance artist whose research spans dance
improvisation, ecological philosophy, site-based performance, tree-climbing,
guerilla tree-planting and community practice. Malaika studied dance, theatre,
biology and improvisation at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Hollins
University, Kyoto Art Centre, Dartington College of Arts and PARTS in Brussels
and was awarded a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Fellowship in support of her
postgraduate research.
Her PhD thesis, entitled ‘Twig Dances:
Improvisation Performance as Ecological Practice', examines the usefulness of
improvisation and phenomenological methodologies in facilitating a
practitioner's understanding of his performative role in relation to a wider
whole that includes notions of self, space, time, structure, politics and
paradoxical working processes. Finding ways to facilitate this
‘ecological understanding' through practice and performance-making is the crux
of her research interest. This relates to health through healthy and safe
movement practices within the dance studio (including somatic work toward
functional alignment, and the states of alertness that support this) and as
environmental observation practices outside the dance studio (including located
cultural exchange, dialogic practices and planting trees).
A significant strand of this research is represented in the 2006 collaborative, peripatetic project TWIG: Together We Integrate Growth, which was funded in part by Vitamin Creative Space Gallery and Nanling Eco-Tourism Company. TWIG Project was an initiative to cultivate ecological awarenesses by facilitating art-making in cross-cultural community settings. Working with 136 schoolchildren in Ruyang village of China's Guangdong province, TWIG developed processes for using dance improvisation and drawing (among other art and gardening practices) to enhance perception of the local developed and natural environment. Malaika has performed her improvisation score Twig Dances in numerous outdoor locations across Europe, Asia and Africa to audiences of all ages gathered on urban streets and dirt roads as well as in school yards, theatres and art galleries.
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