Daniel Phoenix Singh (photo: Metro Arts) |
Daniel Phoenix Singh performing Vasanth |
Daniel Phoenix Singh is seen in one of the performance poses of his syncretic blend of Bharata Naytam and Modern genres of dances. His two hands are spread open like the petals of a lotus flower, his arms are in a long diagonal, reaching into space while he is spiraling his upper body in contrast to his lower body. He is wearing dark blue pants with turquoise blue pleats on the sides.
Listen to Daniel Phoenix Singh: True change from the roots
on my Body and Soul podcast here.
Daniel Phoenix Singh has worked in higher education, the field of dance, queer communities, South Asian communities, and in arts
practice, policy, and funding at local and national levels. His
identities lie at the intersection of his queer, antiracist, South
Asian, immigrant, artist, and advocate roles in the various communities
he inhabits.
He acknowledges the complicity
and internalization of colonial and racial oppressions in his life and
works hard to approach issues from an anticolonial and antiracist
perspective. He has been influenced by the work of Erode Venkatappa
Ramasamy (aka Periyar | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Periyar), Rabindranath Tagore, Arundhathi Roy, Toni Morrison, and particularly Justin Laing (http://hillombo.net/about/) who work from intersectional frameworks.
In
his dance practice, Daniel was mentored by Pamela Mathews as curiosity
took him from computer science to a dance major in college. He is deeply
grateful to Lorry May, Harriet Moncure Williams, and Karen Bernstein
for helping shape his choreographic voice. Madhavi Mudgal and Leela
Samson in India have broadened his perspectives on the space Indian
dance forms can occupy both within the body, in the pedagogy, and field
of dance.
He is a single parent to amazing twins who have been his foremost teachers and test his improvisational skills every day.
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