Meena Murugesan
Montréal 45° 30' 11.46" N, 73° 34' 11.30" W Dance Visual Arts Person
Meena Murugesan Choreographer, Dancer, Community Arts Facilitator
“As an emerging artist [Meena Murugesan] is someone to watch for.”
— dance critic Philip Szporer, Dance Current, 2008
Meena's multi-disciplinary artistic practice is fuelled by her passion for dance, visual imagery, personal transformation and social change.
Her hybrid choreographic vision stems from twenty-two years of training and performing the South Indian classical dance form Bharatha Natyam, two years of studying with contemporary African dance pioneer Zab Maboungou, a decade of creating still and moving imagery, and five years of training in eastern energetic bodywork therapy.
Meena's choreographies include home/Body (40-minutes, 2009), AVAL (26-minutes, 2008), Unravelled (50-minutes, 2006), Ekatva (15-minutes, 2006) in addition to a dozen other improvisational works performed with Bell Orchestre, LAL, Kalmunity Vibe Collective, Jason 'Blackbird' Selman, Kamala Sundararajan. Since 2004, she has performed her original choreographies and improvisational works in Canada, New York City, Niger, Chile and Brazil.
Parallel to Meena's dance career, she is also a video artist and community arts educator with eight years of local and international experience collaborating with under-represented groups such as youth, people of colour and incarcerated women.
She is currently performing AVAL and developing two new choreographies, one which will premiere at Tangente, Montreal, in Fall 2011. She is the founder of artistic director of meenAkshi productions.