Anya Sirina

Anya Sirina (b. 1996), performance artist and choreographer.

"Since graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2019, I have been making my own performance work within the DIY scene in Glasgow, choreographing performances in unconventional dance spaces: inside an industrial refrigerator of an abandoned M&S, the roof of an NCP car park, and in disused textile and paper factories.

I often find parallels between the industrial melancholy of these urban sites and the landscape I grew up in around northwest Wales, where physical traces of the slate industry have left geological scars along with a lingering sense of abandonment. Inevitably the raw immediacy of this landscape has bled into my performance work.

My work is often preoccupied with tension: placing guttural high-energy physicality in spaces of loss and decline. I find my work is a meeting of contrasting forces at play embodying movements that conjure tension and release. As improvisation is my main way of working, music and sound plays an important role in the process of drawing out movements from within myself. I find inspiration in repetitive, bassy, deconstructed and distorted sounds."

Anya's work has been shown in venues and festivals across the UK: The Work Room (Glasgow), Dance Base (Edinburgh), Embassy Gallery (Edinburgh), Scottish Documentary Film Festival (Stirling), Cardiff Dance Festival, plus further afield in Australia World Fringe Festival (Perth), Dansefestival Barents (Norway) and Impulstanz International Dance Festival (Vienna). In 2021, Anya choreographed National Dance Company Wales as part of the Laboratori Programme.

@anyasirina