Sonya Lindfors is a Cameroonian-Finnish choreographer and artistic director who also works with facilitating, community organising and education. In 2013 she received an MA in choreography from the University of the Arts Helsinki.

Lindfors is the founding member and Artistic Director of UrbanApa, an inter-disciplinary and counter hegemonic arts community that offers a platform for new discourses and feminist art practices. UrbanApa hosts workshops, festivals, labs, mentoring and publications among other things. UrbanApa’s fourth publication Words make worlds will come out in December 2021 and was was curated and edited by Lindfors and Maryan Abdulkarim.

Lindfors makes her own and collaborative works such as performances, curated programmes and performative actions. Her performance works have been shown and supported by Beursschouwburg, Kampnagel, Spring Utrecht, CODA Festival, Black Box Theater Oslo, Zodiak – Centre for New Dance among others. She is a member of Miracle Workers Collective that represented Finland at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Lindfors’s recent works We Should All Be Dreaming (2018), Soft Variations Online (2020) and camouflage (2021) centralise questions of blackness and black body politics, representation and power structures, speculative futurieties and decolonial dreaming practices. On a larger scale, Lindfors’s time is divided between her own artistic work, educational work and working as the artistic director of UrbanApa. In all her positions she pursues creating and facilitating anti-racist and feminist platforms, where a festival, a performance, a publication or a workshop can operate as the site of empowerment and radical collective dreaming.

Lindfors has been awarded with several prizes, the latest of which being the international Live Art Anti Prize 2018. During the season 2017 – 2018,L indfors was the house choreographer for Zodiak – Center for New Dance.

One Drop

Scaling Up Co-Production

“The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States asserting that any person with even one ancestor of sub- Saharan-African ancestry, "one drop" of black blood, is considered black.”

One Drop will interrogate questions around the spectacle of otherness as well as the intricate relationalities between modernity and colonialism. It continues a series of works by Sonya Lindfors dealing with the thematics of blackness and otherness, focusing on ghosts and haunting. The work strives to make complex power structures visible, to reveal the construction of whiteness with the help of the performative power of the stage. The multi-layered work adventures at the interfaces of choreography and contemporary theatre, combining different performing techniques, corporeality, text, and classical music. 

COPRODUCTION
One Drop is a Big Pulse Dance Alliance co-production, co-produced by Julidans (The Netherlands) and Zodiak – Side Step Festival (Finland), co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

Co-produced by Kampnagel International Summerfestival, Hamburg (Germany); Beursschouwburg, Brussles (Belgium), BUDA/Kortrijk, Brussels (Belgium), Zodiak – Centre for New Dance, Helsinki (Finland), Goethe-Institut (Germany).

"Sonya Lindfors and the artists that she has been working with since 2012 are doing what all contemporary artists must do: she is breaking tradition! She is using tools from the past and the present. She is dedicated to dismantling the canon. She has written herself and those who are often absent from visions of the future into a place and a time where we can experience the joy which is cultivated through healing, community, and transformation."
– Isaiah Lopaz

"If I were to lay bare the most striking feature in Lindfors’ piece, I would highlight its ability to project the audience into a Black future which nods to the work of Octavia Butler, Toni Adeyemi, and Nnedi Okorafor while underscoring just how in and of the present Black bodies are, and have always been since the invention of racial structures and frameworks. "
– The Theatre Times (on Cosmic Latte)