Living In Color / In Living Color

This series of performative actions and interventions departs from the urgent, unsettled question: What does it mean to be “of color”?

By weaving together traces of past works with new performative experiments, the working group opens a collective space where ghosts are summoned and portals opened. The work is an invitation to remain with the discomfort of racialization while moving towards futures that imagine Blackness as processes of becoming—fluid, multiple, and ever-expanding. A decolonial and speculative practice where Blackness can be dreamt and re-dreamt.

For more than a decade, Sonya Lindfors has been working with the thematics of Blackness and Black body politics, interrogating questions of power and representation both on and off stage, while actively practicing imagining further. Living in Color / In Living Color is the beginning of a larger body of works under the title Black & Blue.

Sonya Lindfors is a Cameroonian-Finnish choreographer and artistic director that also works with facilitating, community organizing and education.
Lindfors is the founding member and Artistic Director of UrbanApa, an inter-disciplinary and counter hegemonic arts community that offers a platform for new discourses and feminist art practices. UrbanApa hosts workshops, festivals, labs, mentoring and publications among other things. Lindfors’s works centralize questions of Blackness and Black body politics, representation and power structures, speculative futurities and decolonial dreaming practices. On a larger scale Lindfors’s time is divided between her own artistic work, educational work and working as the artistic director of UrbanApa. In all her positions she pursues creating and facilitating anti-racist and feminist platforms, where a festival, a performance, a publication or a workshop can operate as the site of empowerment and radical collective dreaming.Maele Cheza Sabuni is a multifaceted dancer, choreographer, performer, and DJ based in Stockholm. With over 15 years of touring and performing internationally, his work spans prestigious stages and events including Cullberg, Riksteatern, Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, and SVT’s Swedish National Day broadcast. As both a title-winning street dancer and choreographer of the acclaimed Bach In the Street, Sabuni bridges cultural, artistic, and musical worlds. Under the alias DJ Cheza, he has become a household name in Sweden’s DJ scene, known for genre-bending sets at events like Way Out West and the Polar Music Prize.Benson A’Kuyie is a singer, dancer, and performer whose practice is deeply rooted in Krump, shaping his explorations of Afrofuturism, queerness, spirituality, and magic. His work spans film, installation, and stage, including the performative short Shaman (2020), which was presented internationally and at the MARKK Museum in Hamburg. In 2023, he premiered his solo performance SanctuarYIE at the A Wa Nibi Festival, inviting audiences into a meditative, trance-like world, and collaborated as choreographer and performer in Naomi Kelechi Odhiambo’s Dinge, die wir nicht sagen. Most recently, he was awarded a residency in Malmö to develop his new piece [GN-z33/6°].Direction, choreography and concept: Sonya Lindfors
Performers: Benson A’kuyie and Maele Sabuni
Sound design: Jussi Matikainen
Production: UTT ry and Sonya Lindfors
Co-production: The Finnish Museum of Photography
Photographer: Tuukka Ervasti /(From work Living in Color / In Living Color  from series Black & Blue by Sonya Lindfors)
The performance is part of the Reykjavík Dance Festival program. The festival program can be found at https://www.reykjavikdancefestival.com/