ankita sharma | August 24-29, 2026
During their residency, ankita will be working on “Human, Vermin” – a 48-hour long live-and-livestreamed, interactive, solo endurance performance that investigates surveillance, mistreatment, and interspecies relationships along the human/animal divide. As human, animal, and environmental rights are systematically dismantled, they ask “How are humans treated “like animals?” How are the politics of disgust mapped on to human and animals alike?” “What does it mean to be a human that’s considered a pest?”
This dance-theater theater experiment uses immersive world-building design, audience interaction, maskwork, and animalistic improvisations to tell a satirical pseudoscience narrative about the evolution of humanity. During the residency, ankita and their collaborator, Soren Kodak, will be setting the space up like an indoor terrarium and creating a list of 48 hour-long improvisational scores to follow, during which they evolve from animal to human and back again.
In-person audiences will be invited into the space to observe and interact with ankita’s animal body according to set tasks, if they choose. There will also be surrounding visual and informational pieces about “Human, Vermin” and its concepts in the space. The full performance will also be available via livestream.
Artist Statement:
ankita is a Brooklyn-based experimental choreographer and writer invested in storytelling where content dictates genre and betrays expectations. They create to think critically, unpacking systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in the body and mind. In aesthetic, their performances are grungy, cheeky, character-based works of primal spirit, with movement practices rooted in Contemporary Dance, Dance-Theater, and forms from both the South Asian and the African diaspora. ankita enjoys intense physical transformation, scintillating humor, and getting audience members to laugh or cry (sometimes both!).
