Each year we select Dance Partners from the Yorkshire Region to receive tailored producing and dramaturgy support from our Artist Development Producer João Maio, £3,000 seed funding and residency space to support the development of their project. Our 2026 Dance Partner is Akshay Sharma.

Akshay Sharma – Untitled

“I will be working on a solo using movement and voice methodology through song delving into my practice of movement, Indian classical music vocal practice and writing. I am interested in exploring the figure of a man inhabiting the streets at night. It makes me curious about the identities that arise and the meanings that emerge. I am curious about how the voice lives in this world of the night and what it has to offer to wandering souls.”

Akshay is an Indian-born choreographer and performance artist based in Leeds. He is interested in interrogating questions of place, placemaking, and space. His work incorporates movement, Dhrupad Hindustani, a style of Indian classical music, and writing.

“Over the next year I am really curious about delving deeper into the ever-difficult task of asking the body to sing while it moves. I am interested in the exhausting but natural marriage of the two forms that are very dear to me. I am also excited about the possibility of expanding into new directions with choreography and place making that emerge from imaginations of migration and queerness.”

Images (c) Camilla Greenwell