An Evening Performance with Jahra Wasasala

Artspace Aotearoa is pleased to host Jahra Wasasala for an evening performance on the 15th of May.

Looking to movement and embodied practice as the active rupture between the performer and audience, Artspace Aotearoa is excited to present the work of a ground-breaking choreographer and movement visionary.

Jahra Wasasala is a world-builder, movement psychopomp and writer of realms of Viti/Fiji and Euro origin, based in Aotearoa (New Zealand). Within the Islands of Viti, she hails from the provinces of Ba and Macuata.
A student of mythology, her bloodline and deepens her ideations of ancestral attunement. Jahra utilises her training and specialisation within performance activation, various street dance style techniques and poetic/voice soundscape as a psychopomp for shape-shifting and storytelling through her public and personal embodiments.

Jahra’s solo and collective embodiment works have toured across Aotearoa, Australia, Hawai’i, New York, Berlin, Guahån and Canada. Jahra has created commissioned embodiments for institutions such as the Auckland War Memorial Museum in Aotearoa, The Banff Centre in Calgary, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Jahra’s facilitation and mentoring skill are an integral part of her work. She has worked with collectives, training institutions and initiatives throughout Aotearoa and overseas such as Rising Voices, Pacific Tongues, Sailing Solo, Action Education Inc and MIXIT Refugee Youth Arts. Jahra’s movement and poetry intensives work towards enabling participants to emancipate their internal worlds and develop their personal languages within the written, and in the flesh.

Jahra recently performed her embodiment work ‘GOD-HOUSE’, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the closing event for the 'ATEA: Nature & Divinity in Polynesia' exhibition in October, 2019.

Jahra was a founding member of the Youth Advisory Board for the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and has been published in the poetry anthology ‘SOLID AIR': Australian & New Zealand Spoken Word’.

Jahra is the 2016 recipient of the Prime Minister’s Pacific Youth Award for the Arts, and is a 2017 TedxAuckland speaker. In 2020, Jahra was invited to perform at the first Women’s Theatre Festival in Cairo, Egypt.

Jahra is known for her transcending performances, conjuring voice and otherworldly physicality.
Her choreographic vision aims to serve as a platform to create open discussions on the connections with historical events, and we warmly invite the public to witness to such a brilliant performer.