Batu by Ayu Permata Sari and Hasyimah Harith

Ayu Permata Sari is a choreographer and dancer from North Lampung, Indonesia. She founded Ayu Permata Dance Project as a platform to encourage herself and her collaborators in developing their practice. Since 2020, Ayu has focused on reading and reinterpreting the position of women and men in the Lampung Pepadun tribe—an ethnic group native to Sumatra, to which Ayu belongs. This process is her way of criticising the traditional values of the Lampung Pepadun tribe today. In 2019, Ayu presented TubuhDang TubuhDut at Spielart Theater Festival, Germany. Her latest work Load? premiered at Zürcher Theater Spektakel in 2021.

Hasyimah Harith is a Malay-Muslim female artist from Singapore that performs, choreographs and teaches Malay folk dance. Using her body as the starting point, Hasyimah works with Malay traditions and eroticism as a way to reclaim agency over her body. Her working methods involve strategies of boosting libido such as fantasy and intimacy. Her works hope to confront and overcome the conditioned shame and grief that is often attached to female eroticism. Hasyimah leads as Company Manager of P7:1SMA, a dance company which believes that dance is a strategy, and being Malay is a concept. She is an Associate of Dance Nucleus, a choreographic centre for independent artists and the creative development of contemporary performance.