Run Like a Girl

Director, Choreographer, Dancer (USA)

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.

Dancer (Benin)

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.

Dancer (Brazil)

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.