Blog | Shivaangee Agrawal (Artist Commissions)

Shivaangee Agrawal

Akademi Artist Commissions recipient, Shivaangee Agrawal, shares the creative journey behind her new project ‘The Hope Loop’ (working title).

The research / the idea

I’m researching the relationship between hope and hopelessness, and by extension, other poles of existence such as fatigue and rejuvenation, action and inertia. Rather than believing time is linear, with us heading towards a certain kind of future, I’m mapping the relationship between hope and hopelessness as a looping one, where both states exist on a wheel, recurring over and over again. My central enquiry asks:

If hope and hopelessness could actually exist on a repeating cycle (like the seasons, or the menstrual cycle, or the night-day rotation of the earth), how would this change our relationship to both?

In trying to map them in relation to each other, I’m paying attention to them across different scales of experience. The autobiographical scale informs me somatically, as I cycle between these states frequently and to my deep exhaustion. On the interpersonal scale, I sense the movements between intimacy and isolation, autonomy and conformity, growth and rupture.

On the political scale, I notice the tides of hopelessness coming in high for the past 5-6 years, drowning easily desires to do something, anything, about climate collapse and genocide. What I’m finding through this research is, somehow, hopeful.

The process

Over two weeks at DanceEast, in Ipswich, I considered these questions in relation to an audience-immersive, or audience-interactive work. I worked with my collaborator Tom Shennan, with whom I’m building an audience-centric making practice, to understand and prototype how we might lead audience members on an embodied journey through hope, hopelessness and all the states in between, and back again.

We focused on building and testing a prototype first, rather than spending two weeks in deep movement research, which was a new way of working for me and which came out of learnings from being on FACT Liverpool’s Crip Camp this year. We developed a multi-screen interactive installation, lasting 20 mins and tested it with 3 small audience groups of up to 10 people at a time. Dance featured as projected film within this installation, and I’m grateful for the contributions and labour of those who joined me for short periods of dance research, including Anjana Bala, Divya Ravi, Devaki Rajendran, Kavya Iyer, Meera Patel and Rammani Mandal.

The next steps

I’m continuing to develop the movement vocabulary and scores that help me engage in the central research question, and I’m planning to spend 4 weeks in residency next year turning our prototype into a full experience that can be shared with audiences. If you’re interested in supporting this work (in-kind space, in-kind time, cash support, access support, hosting workshops etc), or you’re an artist and interested in being part of the research, please do get in touch with me at shivaangee@gmail.com. More information about the project is here: shivaangee.com/hopeloop.