Darion Adams

Fellow 2025
multidisciplinary dance artist and choreographer from Manenberg, Cape Town, South Africa
cooperating partner: Moya Michael (Brussels, Belgium)

Darion Adams is a multidisciplinary dance artist and choreographer from Manenberg, Cape Town whose work explores identity, heritage, and community. Darion’s work merges performance, film, and activism. Projects like
//is ge sada..., STAND TF UP, and The AIM Society’s initiatives in Manenberg have shaped their interdisciplinary practice.

In partnership with Moya Michael, Darion Adams will enter a process of excavation - unearthing identity, memory, and personal histories through an interdisciplinary lens. This journey will unfold across text, image, movement, and place, with documentation as both record and reflection. Through site-specific activations and embodied inquiry, the work invites public encounter, challenging and expanding the boundaries of choreography as living research.

"South Africa is a diverse country, with many ethnic groups with their respective cultures – Coloured people are one of these. We specifically support Darion Adams, because they are an artist who wants to defy the notion that to identifying oneself as Coloured is “controversial, demeaning and insulting”. Darion’s work seeks to bring voice, alleviation, and confirmed identity to the culture that they were born into, bred, and live in. Hailing from a very big Coloured community, Manenberg, Darion’s art work will indeed contribute to the value of unity in diversity, where every ethnic group in South Africa had a tremendous contribution in the fight against Apartheid.
Darion’s mentor, Moya Michael agrees to Darion’s goal, as she says: 'I am eager to explore how Darion and I can merge our interests and foster a meaningful partnership by engaging in critical, cross-border conversations on how our identities have been shaped within the historical classification of the Coloured identity and the ways we navigate and redefine these narratives.'"
- From the Jury Statement