Today we’d like to introduce you to devika v. wickremesinghe.
devika, before we jump into specific questions about your work, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I’ve been a student for as long as I can remember. “Dance” might be, for me, just a trick I’m playing on myself in order to continue to inhabit this role. For a long time I thought you had to choose between the brain and the body, between calling yourself a mover and a maker, student or a teacher.
I grew up in Staten Island, an outer-borough of New York City famous for Wu-Tang and a garbage dump, a small island with strip malls featuring dance schools with names like “Miss (Insert Name Here)’s School of Dance” which was usually situated, fortunately enough, next to a pizzeria. Dancing school was what many girlchilds were made to do, and I liked it, and I liked the pizza that came after it. There was never a question of choosing it, it just became something that I did. The order, the patterns, the music all allowed my brain to organize sensations. Somehow a teacher from the Martha Graham school made the arduous journey by ship to teach at that school and all of a sudden it was high drama and all black leotards and secret witchy movement and I loved it. I devoured books and TV and my moms copies of Vogue and was generally always thirsty for images.
In college I was astounded to discover that you could not only study Art History but you could double major in Dance as well, and the feast continued.
I wrote my thesis on Ed Ruscha and the cool-guy crew of Los Angeles visual artists of the 60s. I didn’t want to be their girlfriend, I didn’t want to paint pictures, but I sure did want to be them. I imagined driving down Sunset with all that space and freaky colored skies with Ed’s scripts in my head. MALIBU IS SLIDING GLASS DOORS. I knew nothing much about California other than putting time in as a teen wannabe ska-punk who fetishized the other coast. In this was it seems inevitable now that I would end up in LA.
NY was arduous and wonderful. I was rehearsing and taking class and performing and moving at full speed most of the time. There was always something going on, more class to take, more shows to see, more money to make, more money to make, more money to have to make. After a while burnout and injury and depression took hold and I was surprised at how much the joy was squeezed out of my day-to -day. Performing was the transcendent prize, just the gift of being allowed to enter a piece fully. I was only dancing for other people then. I loved and still love to learn the choreography, to inhabit someone else’s forms and ideas. An inevitable hip injury from overuse (staying out all night, working all day, rehearsing at night, repeat) introduced me to Pilates, which I thought could be a quick trick for fixing my body my own damn self.
I trained to be a Pilates teacher with no intention of making a career of it. The fitness industry as a whole makes me sick, and I couldn’t comprehend introducing yet another competitive hellhole into my landscape. but I really did enjoy teaching- mostly the translating of body feelings into action using imagery, again turning to images to save me. I’m indebted to folks like Irene Dowd for allowing my teaching to become another creative practice.
My last months in NYC were filled with a weird burst of energy. It was as if deciding to leave, and really understanding that leaving New York could be possible (up until then I never believed I could live anywhere else), that I started to get to know a different kind of spaciousness inside myself. My brain and creative capacity started to crack open in new ways. It was around this time when I started making up lies in the bio’s for show programs. In my bio I would add a bit about receiving a generous grant, or a residency, or a prestigious award from the “Institut IDGAF”. This started as an inside joke with my pal Sam Allen, to see if anyone would notice, or even get it, and to show our disdain for all the name dropping and high stakes stupidly we felt was surrounding us. Sam and I danced together in college and started to fuck around with making dances together. It seemed less like serious high art endeavors and more like provoking each other out of boldness and boredom. We had so much fun, and turned the dances into films, and called ourself the INSTITUT IDGAF.
It turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy- we were suddenly freed up to make whatever we wanted, because of the generous psychic, spiritual support of this mystery Institute, this organization outside of ourselves that proclaimed loudly that we really didn’t care (because we did, and still do.)
After my 30th birthday, I packed my shit and drove across country in an old Subaru, arriving in Lincoln Heights to a magical fall. I landed at Pieter Performance Space, a very special place which is the City Hall/Grand Central Station/magical vortex of my Los Angeles, run at the time by Jmy James Kidd, whose dancing, bravado (it was Jmy who I first noticed using pseudonyms in programs in New York) and deep generosity made an impact on me back east and sherpa’ed my whole existence out west. Pieter allowed everything to happen- a welcoming place that felt like a real community in a city where all I heard was that nobody talks to each other. I rehearsed there for folks I met, I started teaching and taking class, and over the years as we continue to make work, the INSTITUT creates and performs work there .It still feels like my home.
At Pieter I began offering Pieterlates, which gave me the opportunity to make Pilates teaching a part of my creative practice. It is a practice in creating spaces that feel humane and healing as well as challenging and fun. I’m blessed to offer private instruction at Hyperbody Gym (the incredible neon palace of LA’s hottest cyborg fitness guru HYPERBODY ) as well as Everybody Gym (an intentionally inclusive gym explicitly welcoming all bodies, a truly remarkable place I am so grateful to be a part of).
Its been almost five years in this magical city and I’m tremendously grateful for everything it has allowed to happen. Mostly it is space- space to notice the light in the early afternoon over the LA River, space to spend hours alone at the sea or reading in the backyard, space to make art because (at least when I got here) it felt like the pressure was off to force art to happen. It could happen on its own time and its own rhythm. I’ve never felt more like myself because I’m allowed or have allowed myself to continue to be a student of my own course, learning how to be a dancer person, performance maker, community member, teacher, collaborator. I’m so happy to be here.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I’ve been mourning the removal of the “Good Foot/Bad Foot” sign that was a stronghold of lower Sunset. Driving up and seeing which foot caught your eye- the joyful dancing one or the limping one bandaged and on crutches, served as a kind of fakey modern oracle. I believed it. I’m superstitious by nature and I don’t know why or how things unfold but all I know is I am grateful to be here and to have certain wonders of life revealed to me, secret joys, and immensely beautiful things. I have had the privilege and blessing of love and support and the luck of having people around me that believe in my endeavors. Dancer people are always in a state of falling and getting back up, and learning that time is not linear but circular. We navigate physical pain and injury, financial instability, soul crushing anxiety, and somehow continue to do what we do because theres no question about it. Its the way I see the world and how I am in it. I will always find solace and support from art and images, in the words of people who have tried to live this kind of life. Like a snake eating its own tail, life continues, if we are lucky. I feel I have been.
Please tell us more about your work
I work for myself and think of my work as having different branches. I’m a person first, whose business it is to try my best and try not to do harm. I’m a freelance performer, signing different commitments to various artists to dance in their work. This means agreeing to put my body in a place at a certain time and fulfill their vision to the best of my ability. As a maker, I’m a co-founder of the INSTITUT IDGAF, which has no rules, but it really does, primarily to have fun and make without too much censorship. I’m most proud of the ways in which my partner Samantha Allen and I have sheparded our wild impulses into performance experiences. Our imaginary Institut is the business I love so much, an imaginary office building framework for bringing images into existence. Pilates with Devika is my teacher business, teaching classes and private sessions to folks on the East Side of LA. I’m tremendously lucky to have partnered with Hyperbody, a friendly neighborhood fitness cyborg genius pal whose fantasy gym is close by, where I train my clients and teach class.
I’m proud of my ability to attract the kind of students that I most vibe with- people who are genuinely interested in somatic investigation and a trippy body experience that makes you feel strong and happy. Everybody Gym and Pieter are also incredibly supportive and inclusive places where I am honored to teach. I’m no longer able to work in traditional Pilates studios, or gyms, where body-shaming and other restrictive outdated ideas rule the way people learn to treat their bodies. I really feel at home in all of these branches of business, and just wish I had an assistant.
Contact Info:
- Website: institutidgaf.com pilateswithdevika.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @institut.idgaf @pilateswithdevika
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