Malaika Sarco-Thomas is a dance artist and Lecturer in the Dance Studies programme at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta. Through performance and curatorial projects she investigates the potential of improvisation technologies to facilitate developments in environmental perception, and how performance practices can alter attention to site, physicality and place. Her collaborative peripatetic PhD research project TWIG: Together We Integrate Growth investigated links between 'ecological practice' and dance improvisation through an overland journey from England to China that included guerilla tree-planting and Twig Dances, solo …
Malaika Sarco-Thomas is a dance artist and Lecturer in the Dance Studies programme at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta. Through performance and curatorial projects she investigates the potential of improvisation technologies to facilitate developments in environmental perception, and how performance practices can alter attention to site, physicality and place. Her collaborative peripatetic PhD research project TWIG: Together We Integrate Growth investigated links between 'ecological practice' and dance improvisation through an overland journey from England to China that included guerilla tree-planting and Twig Dances, solo performances with living plants. Since 2011 with Richard Sarco-Thomas she has co-organised Contact Festival Dartington and Conference, an annual platform for the development and exchange of CI practice, and co-teaches Aikicontact, or aikido and CI principles in movement at dance festivals around Europe. Since 2007 they have led weekly contact improvisation jams at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, Falmouth University in Cornwall, where Malaika was Senior Lecturer and course coordinator for Dance & Choreography at the Academy of Music and Theatre Arts, and now practice in San Gwann, Malta. Malaika recently co-edited issue 6.2 of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 'on Contact [and] Improvisation'.
