• zavé holds two golden fans and wears a beaded fringe mask

About

zavé martohardjono is a queer, non-binary trans, Indonesian-American artist born in Canada and living in Brooklyn. Working across performance, film, installation, and poetry, zavé uses dance and ritual as primary languages across projects that engage in anti-colonial storytelling. With dreams of a more just future, they make work that contends with the political histories our bodies carry and prompts inquiry into how healing and political education can de-condition the assimilated body and reconjure liberatory memory. They have made documentaries, experimental films, and video works that have shown in festivals and galleries in the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Scotland, Switzerland, and Indonesia. zavé is a 2022 Bessie-nominated performer whose choreographic and live performances have been presented in theaters, museums, and galleries across the U.S. including in New York, Los Angeles, Omaha, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and in Skopje, North Macedonia.
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up next

Connect Four | March 29-31, 2024 | Center for Performance Research | Tickets | Event Info

Connect Four is J Dellecave’s latest performance work made in collaboration with Brooklyn-based performers Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky and zavé martohardjono. Connect Four is performed by three live performers in a quartet with absence. Through complex walking patterns, hits and misses, and a healthy dose of restarts, this performance explores the rhythms, contours, and textures of missed connections, reconnections, and absence. Staged alongside one another are the joy of queer karaoke, longing lyrics of pop songs, and crash of the ocean; the soft tenderness of connection, drive of pattern, and difficulty of doing it again and again; the care for physical bodies, quietude of mourning, and repetition of ghosts. Note about tickets: Connect Four is Timed entry tickets are for two-hour time slots. The performance cycle takes about an hour and will repeat continuously throughout the four hours of the installation.Connect Four is a memorial to and four-year anniversary of the great shutdown of 2020.

Artist Talk: Arts and Performance after Wars | April 11, 2024 | Rutgers University | Event Info

Alongside artists talks by the illustrious artists Kareem Khubchandani and Sokunthary Svay, I will share excerpts of my newest work asmr4apocalypse and reflections on the current climate of war and injustice at “Arts and Performance after Wars” curated by Dr. Viola Lasmana, Prof. Martin Manalansan, and the Southeast Asians of Rutgers University.

The Dance Union Podcast

I caught up with the illustrious Melanie Greene, co-founder of The Dance Union Podcast, to reflect on the culmination of a five-year performance series, TERRITORY, and talk about post-show life, lulls, and feels. Listen on SoundCloud, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Play Music.

CONTACT ME

If you are interested in chatting about my work, you can email me directly at zave [at] zavemartohardjono [dot] com.
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We can also connect on Instagram.