On Dance in the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora and its Ancestral and Contemporary Ties is an artistic research project by Sara Mikolai that explores how dance mediates identity, war, displacement, and migration between Sri Lanka, Germany, and France. Rooted in her family history, the project traces her mother’s training as a Bharatanatyam teacher in Batticaloa and Jaffna in the 1970s, her flight to Berlin in the 1980s, and the founding of a Bharatanatyam school that has shaped Tamil diasporic life in Berlin for over four decades. Through fieldwork, interviews, and archival and autoethnographic research conducted in Sri Lanka, Berlin, and Paris, the project exposes the cultural labour of Tamil dancers and the role of dance as a form of resilience amid trauma, racism, and displacement. The research forms the basis for a future multimedia work.
Sara Mikolai is a Berlin-based choreographer and interdisciplinary artist working across dance, sound, research, and performance.
