zavé martohardjono is a queer, non-binary trans, Indonesian-American artist born in Tiohtià:ke territory (Montréal, CA) in 1984. zavé grew up in the lands of the Cayuga (Ithaca, NY), Massachusett (Boston, MA), and Munsee Lenape (Queens, NY) and has lived in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY) since 2006. zavé studied Political Economy at Brown University before heading to CUNY City College to study documentary filmmaking. Since 2008, zavé has been making experimental films. And since 2010, they have danced for experimental choreographers including Mariangela Lopez, J Dellecave, and Ximena Garnica among others. zavé produced community-based and devised theater with queer and trans artists and NYC activist organizations before embarking on choreographing and directing their own performance works.
zavé’s performances have been presented at the 92Y, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, BAAD!, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Boston Center for the Arts, Center for Performance Research, EFA Project Space, El Museo del Barrio, Gibney Dance, HERE Arts, Issue Project Room, Movement Research, Storm King Art Center, Wendy’s Subway, the Wild Project, WOW Café Theater, Malastanica in Skopje, Macedonia, and elsewhere. They have exhibited at DEMO2025 at WSA, Flux Factory’s Flux IV gallery, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Asian Arts Initiative, Bronx River Art Center Gallery, Center for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, George Washington University, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, SOMArts Gallery, and Winslow Garage.
zavé has been a member of NEW INC in the Extended Realities track, a Center for Experimental Ethnography fellow at UPenn, a 2022 MRX/Movement Research Exchange program artist in Skopje, Macedonia, 2021 NYPL Dance Research Fellow, a 2019 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, a 2020 Gibney Dance-in-Process resident, 2017-2018 LMCC Workspace Resident, a 2011 EMERGENYC artist, and has had residencies at the Bronx Museum, Shandaken: Storm King, Gibney Work Up 3.3, and Chez Bushwick. From 2017-2022 zavé was a Dance/NYC Symposium committee member.
Their work has been written about in BOMB Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Culturebot, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times. And zavé’s writing has been published in Imagining: A Gibney Journal, The Dancer Citizen, and in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics.
Dedicated to community-driven justice, they lead social justice strategy both in and outside the art world.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I create spaces and time-based works that spark radical imagination and invite audiences to process political realities from their bodies, senses, intuition, and materiality around them. As a trans artist and activist of color, my works reflect liberatory ecosystems I am part of. A multidisciplinary choreographer, I make performance, dance theater works, films, and installations using a few core languages that trace across all my works: dance, ritual, and history.
A mixed-race Indonesian-American artist, I am interested in pushing against Western assimilation and taking up ritual, mythology, and ancestral reconnection to connect legacies of colonial empire with contemporary political conditions. My dance film AY.EYE.AYE (2021) filmed in NYC during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown is a choreopoem on time lost and gained. The a slow and meditative film portrays how my dance practice became as a solitary ritual in 2020 pandemic lockdown. In the video, I dance spontaneously and alone in the open air in Lenapehoking by Brooklyn’s East River to no audience. This action mirrors the small, unwitnessed, impulsive dances I danced during lockdown when the field of performance was shut down. Set against images of this solitary dance and natural landscapes emptied of people (which I visited for quiet walks during lockdown), a poem about ancestral communication describes personal and political grief, confusion, and rage about global crisis.
Works like my film AUTOGEOGRAPHY: A KIND OF BEGINNING (2011), my play BROTHER LOVERS (2015), and my dance-theater project TERRITORY (2018-2022) experimented with timeless parables, reinventing characters from Indonesian dance-theater and epics like the Mahabharata. Queering mythological characters who feature prominently in Indonesian dance like the Barong, Rangda, and Karna and Arjuna, I pulled these archetypes out of history and placed them in contemporary times where gentrification, climate crisis, and heightened political theater is rampant. TERRITORY is dance-theater performance connecting pandemic racial justice uprisings, colonization, and climate injustice. A parable of an island suffering climate disaster is told to audiences by fierce campy global South deities who dance, invite spectators to partake in rituals, and scold spectators about their responsibilities to the lands they live on, reminding them of the ancestral lineages of present-day revolutions. Looking to stories from my ancestry to grapple with present-day geopolitical questions is my way of connecting past to present and unwinding the colonial conditioning that limits my imagination of what futures are possible.
My most recent dance works are about collectivity, resilience, and ecological interdependence as tools to care for the lands and communities we belong to. A settler of colour, I grew up on and still live on unceded Lenape land (now known as Queens and Brooklyn, NY). I think about my role in taking care of the lands I live on and the many communities I live interdependently with—both human and interspecies. My dance film LAND/ESCAPES (2023) interrogates present-day responsibilities of queer immigrant settlers on Turtle Island. In it, two dancers (myself and co-choreographer J Dellecave) play, melt, and devolve in idyllic forests and crumbling colonial estates on unceded Lenape land. Cycling and stunted, they ask “Where do we go?”. This question refers to a question posed to me during a performance art encuentro in México City in which I was part of a decolonization cohort led by Decolonize This Place. Visiting Zapata and Indigenous activists leading rematriation projects in México, we interrogated our collective responsibilities to decolonization, framed by Decolonize This Place’s central question, “When Indigenous lands are taken back, where will we all go?”
Another multifaceted dance project, ASMR4APOCALYPSE (2025-2027) considers ecological resilience in times of disaster. ASMR4APOCALYPSE is presented in two formats: a sound installation in a soft resting space and an evening-length dance performed in a space decorated with biomaterial sculptures. In both, audiences can eat medicinal herbal jellies that aid their dreaming of more just futures, are encouraged to rest, and practice somatic exercises and meditative contemplation. A spatialized narrated soundtrack guides their meditation, reorienting them towards the earth’s history of transformation and regeneration across geological time and their bodies’ natural ability to heal. Surrounded by bioplastic sculptures, dried mugwort bundles that facilitate lucid dreaming, and altars, audiences are transported into Deep Time to collectively envision a future where empire and our built environments will disintegrate and be rewilded to be composted into the earth.
As a teaching artist, I share my choreographic and artistic practices in dance workshops and courses on time-based practices using decolonial, feminist, and disability justice approaches to making. LIMINAL BODIES: Internal Practices for Unwinding Empire, Resiliency Motions for Apocalypse, and Activism, Ecology, Dance: Embodying Liberation are dance workshops and university courses that draw from a variety of artistic, kinesthetic, healing practices, and theater techniques (including authentic movement, Butoh, Qi Gong, Skinner Releasing Technique, Feldenkrais, Theater of the Oppressed). I shape these movement practices with radical, anti-colonial, feminist political education, prompting students and participants to explore a complicated question through their bodies: How can we encounter and untangle settler colonialist habits lodged in our bodies? How can we encounter our bones, organs, fluids, flesh, and the autonomic systems of bodily intelligence in a way that reminds us that histories of collective resistance live in our bodies?