Conference of the Birds

Wendy Jehlen

Wendy Jehlen’s career has been marked by international explorations, study and creative collaboration. She received her Bachelor’s degree in ritual and performance from Brown University and her Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School with a focus on performance and religion in the former Persian world. Wendy engages in collaborations across languages, culture, media and genres.  Her work questions the boundaries that we imagine between ourselves, and seeks to break down these imagined walls through an embodied practice of radical empathy. This practice takes her around the world to conduct workshops, collaborations and performances which she calls collectively Dance Diplomacy. Her unique approach to choreography incorporates elements of Bharata Natyam, Odissi, Capoeira, Kalaripayattu, West African dance, Butoh, and a wide-range of Contemporary movement forms. Her emotionally powerful choreography has been created and performed in the US, Benin, Botswana, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Canada, Italy, India, Japan, Mali, Mozambique, Palestine and Turkey. Works include The Women Gather (2022); Conference of the Birds (2018); Entangling (2015), a duet with Burkinabe choreographer Lacina Coulibaly inspired by Quantum Entanglement; The Deep (2015), a work for 25 dancers created in São Paulo, Brazil, Lilith (2013), a solo on the first woman; The Knocking Within (2012), an evening-length duet on a disintegrating relationship; Forest (2010), a journey through the archetypal forest; He Who Burns (2006), a trio on the figure of Iblis (Satan); Breathing Space (2003), a collaboration with Japanese choreographer Hikari Baba in Tokyo; Crane (2002), based on images from Japanese Buddhist poetry; and Haaaa (2002), inspired by the experience of childbirth. Jehlen has received support from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art (2017-2018), Theater Communications Group (2018), the Japan Foundation (2017), the Boston Foundation (2012, 2017, 2020), New England Foundation for the Arts (2016-2021), Network of Ensemble Theaters (2016-2021), the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (2015-2020), the Boston Center for the Arts Choreographers’ Residency program (2010, 2015), the Artist Fellowship Program of the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2003, 2012), the American Institute of Indian Studies (2001, 2013), the Boston Dance Alliance (2013), the National School of Drama (2006, 2011, 2013, 2020), the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (2011), the Fulbright program (2005-2006), the National Endowment for the Arts (2005, 2019, 2020), the Tokyo American Center (2002), the Puffin Foundation (2001), and the Ford Foundation/Arts International (1996), among others. She is a Fulbright Scholar and a Fulbright Specialist, an Arts Envoy of the US Dept of State, she is on the speaker roster of African Regional Services and has received Public Affairs grants from US Embassies in Benin, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Botswana, Japan, China, Mexico and South Africa.

Ibrahim Abdo

Director, choreographer, and dancer with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Cairo University. He began acting and dancing in 2006 while in university. In 2010 he joined Karima Mansour’s Cairo Contemporary Dance Center training program. In 2017 he received the “Step Beyond” travel grant to attend Impulse-Tanz festival in Austria. In 2016 Ibrahim joined the first Interdisciplinary Music Theater Group in Cairo and concurrently began his own movement research research on the flow of the movement in the body from a contemporary point of view of Sufi whirling and incorporating the concept of free fall. In 2017 and 2018 in service of this research, he conducted two residencies at Alanus University, Germany to learn more about the concept of the flow as understood in the Eurythmie studies. In June 2018 he performed the world premiere of the work “Green Leaves are Gone,” which is a work choreographed in collaboration between Egyptian and Italian choreographers as part of “Focus Young Mediterranean and Middle East Choreographers” in Inteatro Festival. Ibrahim was an ArtsLink Fellow at Dance Exchange in 2022. Ibrahim is interested in redefining the relationship between art institutions and artists in Egypt and the Middle East. In 2022 he established the “What’s Next” platform in Cairo with the intention of  promoting and embodying values like transparency, integrity, and non-hierarchy in the arts. He has been a member of ANIKAYA Conference of the Birds ensemble since 2018.

K Sarveshan

K Sarveshan is a South African Bharatanatyam artist of Indian Origin. His performance practice rigorously explores the complexities of his diasporic cultural heritage and his embodied experience. The interplay between Bharatanatyam, Kalaripayattu, Yoga, Traditional Indian Folk, Kathak, and Carnatic Music has revealed to him a creative path that ferries between the “classical” and the “contemporary”. Bharatanatyam, however, remains the fertile ground from which his creative endeavors take root. Sarveshan’s distinct understanding of Bharatanatyam is derived from his initial training with Savitri Naidoo – student of the formidable Pandanallur Srinivasa Pillai and Indira Rajan – and his expert training received from living legends, Natyaacharya Shanta & V.P Dhananjayan. In addition to being a seasoned Bharatanatyam performer, Sarveshan concerns himself in areas of dance research and scholarship, with a first-class BA Honors in Performance Studies from The University of Cape Town (2021). Diverse dance-work experiences at Bharata Kalanjali, Leela Samson’s Spanda Dance Company, ANIKAYA Dance Theater & The University of Cape Town further enhance Sarveshan’s credibility as an award-winning Bharatanatyam performer, dance-maker and teacher. In 2018, The Madras Music Academy awarded Sarveshan the “Gutty Vasu Endowment Prize” for being the “Best Performer” at the Spirit of Youth Festival 2017. Other titles that have been conferred on him are “Natya Purna” from Bharata Kalanjali, “Natya Bhaarathi” from Visakha Art & Dance Association & “Yuva Kalaa Bhaarathi” from Bhaarat Kalaachaar. He is the 2021-2022 recipient of The Kalaavahini Junior Fellowship, an initiative by Malavika Sarukkai, for which he created and premiered his recent solo work titled, KailāsaKrishna.

Marcel Gbeffa

Marcel Gbeffa is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Centre Chorégraphique Multi Corps in Cotonou, Benin.

Centre Chorégraphique Multi Corps welcomes more than 150 regular students per year, and provides courses, workshops, as well as choreographic and interdisciplinary residencies. Gbeffa is also the director of the Connexion festival and the Labo workshops Benin. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Residence for the 2022-2023 academic year at SUNY Purchase.

Gbeffa trained at the ‘Ecole des Sables’ in Senegal  and began his choreographic career in 2008 with his solo “Et si” which launched him internationally at the Rencontres Chorégraphiques d’Afrique et de l’Océan Indien.

As a performer and assistant choreographer, he has worked and collaborated with choreographers such as Andreya Ouamba, Marceline Lartigue​, and Reggie Wilson and has performed in well known venues such as the Théatre de la Ville in Paris and Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.

Since 2010, Gbeffa has been developing his own movement vocabulary, creating collaborative works in Benin, Brazil, and throughout Europe. Always looking to invent new forms, his artistic approach is inspired and nourished by the traditional dances, rites, and rhythms of his Beninese culture and is hybridized through encounters, collaborations and influences from other disciplines. Contemporary art emerging from Beninese traditions and cults is one of his reservoirs of inspiration.

Recent major works include DIDE, a piece co-created with French visual artist Sarah Trouche which questions the place of women in society in Africa and in the world. Meanwhile, his meeting with the performer Violaine Lochu at ‘The Center’ in Cotonou, Benin, during a joint residence during the winter of 2021 gave birth to AWOLI. He also created Mémoire d’Océan, a video installation which is a dialogue between the souls of enslaved Africans who died during the transatlantic slave trade and the souls of the young African people who die today while crossing the ocean to reach Europe. Since 2021, with the support of the French Institute of Benin and the New Aquitaine Region Fund, he has been working with the performer and visual artist Violaine Lochu on Hòxo. The piece offers a futuristic vision between the intertwined histories of France and Benin via slavery and colonization through Twinning and the Vodoun Hóho cult. In 2023, he will present Chuthulucene, a collaboration with saxophonist Clement Duthoit around the work of Donna Haraway.​

Marcel has been working with ANIKAYA Artistic Director Wendy Jehlen since 2016 in projects including Forest, Conference of the Birds, and Run Like a Girl, a workshop they have co-taught in Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso and Brazil since 2017.

Luciane Ramos-Silva

Luciane Ramos-Silva is dancer, choreographer, anthropologist and cultural organizer. She holds a BA in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo (USP, 2002), an MA in Social Anthropology and African Studies from University of Campinas (UNICAMP, 2008) and a PhD in Performing Arts/Dance at UNICAMP researching the notions of coloniality in dance , pedagogical approaches and south-south relations. She is the 2003 recipient of the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora Award (2003). With this award, she initiated and developed a movement training focusing on blackness and the body in African and African Diasporic communities. Luciane was a guest at the Conference/Festival “Tellling our stories about home” at University of North Carolina in 2016 where she participated as a lecturer, teacher and performer at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center.  She also had the opportunity to teach at Duke University hosted by Professor Thomaz de Frantz at the dance department. In 2015 she presented her research-solo-in progress at Red Pop Art House, in San Francisco, California, oriented by the artist Amara Tabor-Smith. As a performing artist, she has performed as a soloist in venues throughout Brazil. Her solo “Eyes at my back and a smile at the corner of my lips” (2015/2016) was presented in North Carolina and Sao Francisco. She is the Artistic Director of the São Paulo-based performance group Diaspóros Coletivo das Artes.

Danang Pamungkas

Danang Pamungkas was born in Solo, Indonesia. He studied traditional Javanese dance at the Mangkunegaran Palace of Surakarta, and graduated from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Surakarta. From 2008-2011, Danang was a member of the renowned Cloud Gate Dance Company of Taiwan under artistic director Lin Hwai Min. 

Danang received a grant from the Asian Cultural Council for a 6 month residency program in New York City and a fellowship for a 6-week summer choreography program at American Dance Festival in Durham, NC in 2016.

Danang’s own choreography includes “Panyot Pun Padam, “ which was awarded First Prize at The Next Wave Indonesian Choreographer in Jakarta, and performed at the 2004 Surabaya Art Festival; a Beat Project Grant from Kelola Foundation performed at Teater Arena Taman Budaya Jawa Tengah In Surakarta (2011) and Salihara Theatre Jakarta also performed at Indonesian Dance Festival 2012 in Jakarta. He has collaborated as a choreographer with Indonesian director and filmmaker Garin Nugroho on “Opera Jawa Selendang Merah“ performed in Jakarta Theatre. 

Other projects include (2013) “A Part of Passion” performed at Teater Arena Taman Budaya Surakarta. (2013) Festival Salihara Jakarta (2014) “Break the Harmony” at the Welt Museum Impulstanz Festival 2013 in Vienna; “Fly on the Earth” at the Welt Museum Vienna Austria (2013); Residence program from Austrian Ministry of Education Vienna Austria (2013); “ANGST ANGEL; Return” a collaboration with Alex Dea and Maya Dance Theatre, Singapore (2014); “ Whispering of” performed at M1 Open Stage National Museum Singapore (2015); “In one/two world(s)” at Cornell University (2016); choreography of the Silent Film “Satan Jawa” directed by Garin Nugroho (2017); “Kabar Senja” at Taman Budaya Jawa Tengah in Surakarta (2021); “Ruang Bawah” Rumah Banjarsari Studio Surakarta and Bentara Budaya Yogyakarta (2022) “A Quest for Relationship: Island by choreographer Wang Yeu-kwn in Weiwuing Kauhsiong, Taiwan (2022).

Danang has been working with ANIKAYA since 2018 as an ensemble member of Conference of the Birds and is now developing a new work, T(h)ree with ANIKAYA. 

Yasin Anar

Yasin Anar is a contemporary dancer based in Istanbul. He is a graduate of the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University State Conservatory in Contemporary Dance and holds a Master Trainer certificate in Turkish traditional folk dance. Yasin has performed with numerous contemporary dance companies both in Turkey and abroad, including the Istanbul State Opera and Ballet Modern Dance Company, Istanbul Contemporary Ballet Company, Hodjapasha Dance Theatre, DEF Dance Company, and the UK-based Aakash Odedra Dance Company. At MDT Istanbul, he has worked with renowned choreographers such as Beyhan Murphy, İhsan Rüstem, Andonis Foniadakis, Evrim Akyay, Alper Marangoz, Michael Popper, and Aysun Aslan. In addition to his role as a soloist in many productions, he also served as one of the principal soloists in Aysun Aslan’s production of Jizel. He has also been a creative dancer in works by artists such as Sagi Gross and Korhan Başaran at Akbank Sanat. Since 2016, Yasin has been working as a teacher, choreographer, and dancer at Istanbul Dance Factory and has toured the Balkans and Europe with the Zümrüt-ü Anka project. In 2024, he performed a solo piece with his own choreography during the closing show of the Saudi Pro League final match in Riyadh. With the Aakash Odedra Company, Yasin performed in Je Suis, touring worldwide in countries such as Germany, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom, including performances at prestigious venues like Sadler’s Wells. In 2019, he took part as both a choreographer and dancer in the Mosaic project, which was presented at the Effekte Science Festival in Karlsruhe, Germany, bridging the worlds of art and science. Yasin has danced with ANIKAYA since 2018.

Ching-I Chang

Made in Taiwan, active in America and quiet places. MFA. She has a deep love for dance and nurturing harmony. She has danced for Susan Marshall, Gesel Mason, Punchdrunk, and many brilliant artists. She was an original cast member of Sleep No More NYC; as well as a rehearsal director of SNM Shanghai. Most recently, she has toured with ANIKAYA to Palestine and African countries. Along with performing, teaching has been her sacred process of learning. She was a visiting professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and an adjunct at U of California San Diego. She is a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst, Yoga and Yoga Nidra Facilitator. She has bathed in contact improvisation, meditation and yoga since 2005 with occasional teaching and sharing with others. In her free time, she practices calligraphy, plays with voices, and makes bad art. And she loves bananas.

Yousef Sbeih

Yousef Sbeih is a dancer and performer from Jerusalem, Palestine. In 2015, he received a BA degree in Marketing & Business from Birzeit University while simultaneously joining the Austrian non-profit organisation Yantè to become a Community Dance Trainer. He and his colleagues led collaboration efforts with the Palestinian Ministry of Education to integrate a program that teaches non-violent communication skills and physical learning for local school students and the differently-abled.

In 2017, he moved to Norway to pursue a career in performing arts after receiving an apprenticeship with the Norwegian national company of contemporary dance Carte Blanche. He took part in various productions of the company, performing in different cities in Norway, Holland, and Germany.

Since 2018, he has worked as a freelance dancer, collaborating with different choreographers and companies in Palestine and abroad. In 2021 he completed his degree at the National Academy of Dance in Rome. He currently lives between Palestine and Denmark.

Shaw Pong Liu

Violinist and composer Shaw Pong Liu engages diverse communities with creative music and social dialogue by innovating the audience experience of live music. Collaborating with artists from a wide range of disciplines, Shaw Pong creates genre-defying performances which interplay written and improvised music with storytelling and movement. Recent projects include Sunbar, connecting Bostonians with sunlight, warmth, and each other during cold winter months, with the vision of a future mobile solarium; What Artists Knead, a series of breadmaking parties across five neighborhoods in Boston for artists to bake bread and discuss their ideas for Boston’s creative future; Water Graffiti for Peace, a series of outdoor Chinese water calligraphy sessions inviting public play and conversations about peace; A Bird a Day, exploring birdsong, sunrises and composition (resulting in a site-specific composition for 18 solo string players in three tiers of balconies); and Soldiers’ Tales Untold, a musical-narrative production mixing veterans’ stories, live music, and audience dialogue about war. An avid explorer of new sounds, she has received commissions from A Far Cry, Lorelei Ensemble, and Dialogue Chamber Music, and she has premiered new works with groups including Bang-On-A-Can All-Stars, MIT’s Gamelan GalakTika, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. She is a teaching artist for the Silk Road Project, the Urbano Project, Young Audiences of Massachusetts and the New England Conservatory of Music. Shaw Pong was an Expressing Boston Public Art Fellow in 2014-15, artist-ethnographer for Boston’s cultural planning initiative, Boston Creates in 2015, Artist-in-Residence for the City of Boston’s first Artist-in-Residence program in 2016 and is a 2017 Brother Thomas Fellow.

Shahou Andalibi

Shahou Andalibi began learning and performing Persian classical singing and Maqam music at the age of 4 under his father’s teaching. His father, Iraj Andalibi was a well-known Persian musician whose work was especially appreciated amongst Kurdish people of Iran. At the age of 6, he started playing the daf with Maqam method under the supervision of great masters such as Khalifeh Mirza Agha, Khalife Karim, and in the method of his grandfather Haj Abdolsamad Andalibi. Shahou started playing ney professionally at the age of 13. He played in the Avaye Andalib Ensemble alongside his father, Iraj Andalibi. His dedication to music as well as his desire to learn works of other cultures led him to start learning classical western music in 1991. Despite his many valuable and successful performances in Iran, he was banned from performing in public by the Iranian regime in 2013 for one year because of promoting female performance in Iran and his leading role in the vocals of Mahbanu Ensembles accompanied by the two great female musicians, Sahar Mohamad and Mahdieh Mohamadkhani. 

David Bengali

David Bengali is a theater and multimedia designer, based in New York for the past 14 years. He has designed theater, installations, opera, and dance Off-Broadway, Regionally, and internationally, and has worked as an associate designer on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Regionally. David holds a BSE in Computer Science with a Certificate in Theater and Dance from Princeton University, and an MFA in Design for Stage and Film from NYU Tisch. He is a current Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts of Princeton University, where he is exploring intersections between technology and performance via collaborative projects (and also teaches a course titled Technologies for Storytelling in the Performing Arts). David is a firm believer that deep collaboration is key to to creating relevant, affecting works of performance, and that breaking down perceived boundaries between fields, in methods and in content, is key to both the creation and audience reception of artworks in the 21st century. Although technology is a critical tool in David’s work, he seeks not to drive story from what technology can do, but rather to ask questions about what stories we wish to tell, and determine from that starting point how technology can serve art. He strives to create work that derives its energy from the most ancient form of storytelling: live humans sharing physical space with one another. Recent design credits include: The Great Leap (Atlantic Theater Company); Frankenstein (Dallas Theater Center); Rockin’ Road To Dublin (National Tour); Assembled Identity (HERE); The Temple Bombing (Alliance Theatre); Uncommon Sense (Tectonic Theater Project); Van Gogh’s Ear (Ensemble for the Romantic Century); Anna Akhmatova, Jules Verne From The Earth To The Moon (BAM);  Ring of Fire (Endstation Theatre); The Tempest (Classic Stage Company/The Young Company);  Kill Me Like You Mean It (Stolen Chair), Two Point Oh (59E59);  The Sensational Josephine Baker (Theatre Row); Cav/Pag (Tri Cities Opera); Little Nemo in Slumberland (Sarasota Opera)  Jamal Jackson Dance, Ephrat Asherie Dance, Battery Dance Company, Soho Rep.

Anika Nayak

Anika Nayak is a Boston based theater artist focusing on Stage Management, Electrician Work, and Teaching. Anika focuses on creating non hierarchical and collaborative spaces in which theater and art can be created and experienced as what she believes is at it’s core, a universal language of being. Anika most recently has been the Production Stage Manager for White Snake Opera, Production Stage Manager for the UMass Amherst Theater Department, a resident Master Electrician for Moonbox Theater, a returning teaching artist at Wheelock Family Theater and is the Technical Director and Stage Manager for ANIKAYA Dance Theatre. Their work has taken them throughout Massachusetts as well as internationally to Palestine, South Africa, Mozambique and India. She is currently pursuing a certificate in Intimacy Direction and Choreography as the next step in expanding her theater repertoire and creating safe and inclusive workspaces.