Moving Semangat Forward: The Semangat Body

Drawing from Aida Redza’s Penjaga (guardian) practice, participants explore the shifting states of the Pencerita (storyteller), Pendekar (warrior), and Pengubat (healer). Through simple movement scores, we explore how stories, memories, and experiences can move through the body and become our own movement language. No dance experience is required. Come as you are, listen to your body, and discover what it remembers, resists, releases—and how it moves forward. Aida Redza is a Malaysian dance artist, choreographer and socially engaged performance maker based in Penang. She works through the role of the penjaga (guardian), initiating creative projects that nurture, heal and transform by bringing art closer to people and the realities of everyday life. Her practice explores movement, ritual, memory, environment, cultural heritage and community, with a particular concern for human rights, environmental justice, safety and wellness. She is interested in the conservation of culture and heritage not simply as preservation of the past, but as a living process of remembering, transmitting and reinterpreting knowledge through the body. Her work investigates how traditional practices, rituals, stories and embodied knowledge can continue to evolve and remain meaningful in contemporary life. Aida works with diverse communities, including youth, underprivileged groups, persons with special needs, mothers and older adults, using dance as a means to listen, connect, raise awareness and stimulate change. She is Founder of WindRiver Productions, Artistic Principal of Studio Pentas, and President, Artistic Director of Euphoria Penang Modern Dance Ensemble, and an Advisor Panel of Georgetown Festival. Her works include Moved By Padi, Semangat – Restu Padi, Reclaim, Hanyut, Seruan Nadi, Ssegar Angin, Angin Ombulan and Ilmu, presented nationally and internationally. In 2018, she was named a Kakiseni GameChanger at the BOH Cameronian Arts Awards.