Venuri Perera

Venuri is a performing artist exploring contemporary approaches to dance-making in Sri Lanka. Inhabiting a space between dance, theatre and live art, she uses her body as a ‘political provocateur’ and strongly believes in the transformational power of performance.

Venuri was a member of the Chitrasena Dance Company for 13 years. She holds and Master’s Degree in Psychology from the University of Pune and in 2008, and completed her Post Graduate Certificate in Dance from Laban Centre, London (2008), where she received the Michelle Simone Award for ‘Outstanding Achievement in Choreography’. 

Since 2004, she has collaborated in various art projects locally and internationally. She has performed her solo works at festivals/symposia in Europe, South and East Asia. Venuri was part of international residencies including at Indonesian Arts Summit: Yogyakarta/Bali and Asian Arts Theatre:Gwangju, where she researched the cross cultural connections in local rituals. She is part of the ‘Archive Box’ Project initiated for Dance Marathon: OPEN WITH A PUNK SPIRIT! In Singapore International Festival of Arts in 2015. She is a visiting lecturer at the University of Visual and Performing Arts, and a member of the Dance Panel of the Arts Council in Sri Lanka. 

 Yeong Ran, Suh

Yeong Ran, Suh is a performing artist. She researches about ancient beliefs and mythology. 

She first studied Fashion and then moved to Modern Dance, Choreography and Philosophy. Her idea is to obscure the fixed perspective and logic of modern human comparing it to ancient beliefs. 

In 2011, She started to research about Korean shamanism remained in capital city of Korea, interviewed practitioners of village ritual in 22 remained villages. This research created lecture performance <I confess my faith> premiered in festival Bom.

Later in 2013, she participated in Nomadic residency in Mongolia and researched the relation between Korean and Mongolian shamanism. This experience leaded her to the idea that the relation between Korean shamanism and traditional Korean dance & music. From this point, she created the performance < The God of Earth comes up Imperfectly> invited to Festival Bom and Festival Tokyo introducing new possibilities of wild type of technique in art and education inspired by shamanic resonance remained in traditional dance & music. 

Her research and creation is based on her own journeys, multi-cultural experiences, meetings and interviews. Still now on, she is continuing her research in master’s study in roots of ancient religion. 

Natsuko Tezuka  Dancer / Choreographer

Natsuko Tezuka was born in Yokohama, Kanagawa and lives in Itoshima city, Fukuoka now. started her career as a solo dancer in 1996, changing her style from pantomime to dance, and she has worked with themes of trial and error to explore her own style that does not employ conventional techniques.

She produced her Anatomical Experiment series with the theme of body observation in 2001. As a result, the work was presented as a finalist for the Toyota Choreography Award in July 2002. She has participated international exchange programmes and presented her works in New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Berlin, Poland, Jakarta and Rio de Janeiro. She has organized "Dojo-Yaburi" project, which creates opportunities to discuss and experience the styles and methods with artists working in contemporary dance, “Karada Café” – an talk session featuring body with people in various occupations such as architect designer, acupuncture and having experiments with the audience. In 2010, she started a new project entitled Asia Interactive Research, which is a trial to observe folk performing arts in Asia in order to explore the geographical boundary of nations with her partner, Torao Ohsawa. She set up “Fork performing arts research club” which is in relation to Asia Interactive Research from 2011, co-produced with ST spot Yokohama. In August 2012, She participated in “14 Evenings” at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo and produced the experiment of “how can the experiment be a media?”. From December 2012 to February 2013, She performed "Anatomical Experiment -6 ~Departure from a distorted image~" in Fukuoka, Yokohama and Kobe. She moved from eastern Japan to Fukuoka, southwestern Japan in 2013. She performed  “some experiments in decade and a half” in Fukuoka on May 2015 , at Dance Marathon: OPEN WITH A PUNK SPIRIT! In Singapore Arts Festival on August 2015 , at Asian Arts Theatre in Korea on May 2016 .