Profile:
Daria Blum is the protagonist of her own work, embodying different characters as she considers the awkwardness of performance?in the context of art, dance, theatre, and in the banality of day-to-day situations and interactions. Her live performances and video installations implement different styles of movement and dress, texts and music she composes, thematising conflicts in self-representation and in the use of the performing (female) body. Informed by her own fallibilities and investigations into trans-generational trauma, the narratives of her personas strive to prove the status of suffering as driving forces in creative and (re-)generative processes, contrasting dynamics such as audience and performer, humour and tragedy, truth and fabrication.

Residency Plan:
Daria will choreograph new work which “speaks” nonverbally, communicating her recurring themes solely through the body, movement and dance. Tokyo’s codes will be new and unfamiliar, and this first immersion in Japanese culture will force-start the process of circumnavigating language in her work. As Daria’s experience of theatre and dance is grounded in Western aesthetics, she hopes to gain ideas for movement by experiencing and participating in butoh and current Japanese contemporary dance. She will further investigate her responses to unfamiliar topography and cultural ‘strangeness’ by creating new sculptural objects influenced directly by encounters in Japan, eventually integrating these into the choreography?no longer as props or stage sets, but inanimate actors or dancers in a moving piece.

Date	2019.06.16 - 2019.07.31
Place	AIR-2
Website	https://www.dariablum.com/