Shireen Hamza




My practice extends beyond the traditional tools of historians to include a range of embodied research practices, including sound, moving image, and improvised movement.

These methods allow me to ask different kinds of questions and to devise collective research practices.



As a part of the disability dance and contact improvisation communities in Chicago, I have participated in a number of performances as a dancer, sound designer, and writer. I have also brought group improvisational practices to site-specific performances. In "Hide & Seek," Anjal Chande and I improvised together for over two hours at the Arts of Asia wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, guided by its history, "seeking comfort in an alienating place." We drew attention to the ways we are (not) allowed to physically inhabit the gallery as a part of "Cripping the Galleries," co-curated by Maggie Bridger and Sydney Erlikh. The image above, a photograph by Alice Feldt, shows Anjal and I wearing blue vests made by Maggie and moving together and apart on a window sill. Seated, Anjal faces the window, left arm raised in an arc, white screen discarded beneath her. I lie wrapped in a cloth scented with our and sandalwood, moving very slowly across the window sill towards her.





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mona's hands



In a cold city of hospitals, who works the body? Who heats the blood? Mona Bhatt, Ayurvedic practitioner, is one of many. This piece is composed of recordings I made with her over the course of several therapeutic sessions from 2018-2019, in a room she shares with another practitioner in Boston.


This piece was made with the support of the Sonic Ethnography course by Prof. Ernst Karel, as part of Critical Media Practice at Harvard University.



Scores for humoral medicine



From 2023-2024, I facilitated over a dozen workshops for dancers and non-dancers to explore ideas about illness and therapeutics by improvising movement. Each workshop featured a different "score" for movement, which I wrote based on passages from historical texts of medicine. My facilitation style was shaped by bringing together methods from contact improvisation and disability dance. This practice has changed the questions I bring to, and the ways I understand, history.



Seven dancers from chicago's disability dance community move in groups on a marley floor, some seated, lying down, standing, in close physical contact. they work with a score titled "Stone."



iMAGE of ten contact improvisation dancers improvising movement in a range of positions on a sprung wooden floor at oberlin college, mostly in pairs



Shireen Hamza