Jija Sohn
Jija graduated as a choreographer from the SNDO (School for New Dance Development) in Amsterdam in 2015. In the following year, she had the opportunity to develop her first work after graduation through the Moving Forward trajectory. This is where DansBrabant got to know her and in 2016 she participated in our Choreographers Week. In summer 2017, Theatre Festival Boulevard and DansBrabant invited Jija as a Dutch delegate choreographer in the two-year programme Performing Gender Dance Makes Differences a European project around 'dance, gender and activism'. From September 2018, DansBrabant collaborated with Jija in a multi-year project. Together, we organised an ongoing dialogue with numerous relevant partners in PLAN, Moving Futures, Belgium, Germany, United Kingdom and beyond...
For the Moving Forward trajectory, she and two Japanese colleagues created Geisha's Miracle (premiering June 2016), a cleverly layered exploration of femininity and at the same time a play on traditions that modernity embraces and mocks with abandon. Her next project Kyabajo (March 2018) became a solo, in which she puts her own past as a 'Japanese companion' on the scales of power relations and frustrations. Jija made Kyabajo at Dansmakers Amsterdam with a contribution and involvement from PLAN.
Until now, Jija made associative work in which she articulated what ails her as a young woman with Asian roots, emphasising her womanhood and her cultural baggage. Refined, she played with images, colours and clichés, with bodies, space and movement, with truths like cows and lies as if they were printed. Jija made us believe, only to show us that things can or could have been different. Partly through the Performing Gender trajectory, she started to better recognise the socially critical notes in her work. This also led to vigilance. For instance, she discovered in herself the tendency to approach working from themes and expectations in such a way that they force her into a mental and psychological straitjacket. Her greatest aspiration, however, is to arrive at a purely physically driven practice in which she is not seduced by the need for 'quick meaning-making and half-insights'.
In Lands of Concerts, a series of labs and residencies, Jija stretched the idea of performativity and performative space together with performance and visual artist Andrea Folache, actress/singer Lucy Wilke and costume and stage designer Rosemary Allaert. Together, they worked to create an energetic connection that counterbalances the indifferent magnification of inequalities and facile exoticism. 'What is imagination anyway and what is creativity?' they ask themselves. 'How do we make space for both in our exercises and performances as well as in everyday life? And what are the conditions to make imagination again vehicle of freedom, independence and sovereignty for all?'
As a creator, Jija dares to search, doubt, struggle, change course to ultimately stand squarely behind her choices. From artificial urban practices, she develops a desire for intuition, animality and the outdoors. From the sheer concentration with which artworks are created, she propagates the need to seek the origins of creativity and share them with whoever is willing. And in a harsh world of armour and exteriors, Jija cannot but head for a radical intimacy that touches on everything DansBrabant is curious about.
