Guru Suraj
🇮🇳India
About
Guru Suraj is an artist with a background in visual and movement arts, dedicated to facilitating, researching, organizing, and performing Contact Improvisation at the cross-section with other art forms. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Painting from the Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai, and a Master's Degree in Philosophy of Yoga from Tamil Nadu Physical Education and Sports University, Chennai. His curiosity about movement led to years of study of Contact Improvisation and various somatic techniques investigating the mind-body connection. He has been involved in numerous national and international projects as Creative/Artistic Director, Artist in Residence, organizer, and facilitator, including Art Promo Contemporary Art Festival Chennai (2012), Sutra Dance Theatre Malaysia (2013), Cholamandal Artists' Village Chennai (2013), Marapachi Theatre (2013-15), Global Village Project Dubai (2015), Thailand Contact Festival (2019), REAson d'etre productions Canada (2019), Goa Contact Festival (2009-2020), Swaraj University and Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (2021), Moksha Contemporary Dance School (2021), and the Contact Improvisation Residency and CI@50 conference in Oberlin, Ohio (2022), among others. Together with other first Indian practitioners of CI, he founded Contact Improv India (CII) and later InContact, organizations focused on teaching and performing CI throughout India and making the art form accessible to everybody. His artistic practice focuses on discovering ways of interacting unconstrained by convention or tradition, bridging the radical and the traditional, and curating performances that emerge from common ground shared by participants — experimenting at the edges of the arts to let new shapes, encounters, and connections develop on their own.