During her residency in Kanuti Gildi SAAL Laima Jaunzema continues to work with the alter-egos of Lizard Woman – apractice that has been evolving since 2021. Its urgencies shiver in the existential embodiment of desire to achieve multiple dreams at the same time, yet fearing it may be impossible.
Lizard Woman is a Self-made professor-e, an enigmatic, lethargically aging provocateur who shifts and evolves between a spectrum of alter egos. Her body and voice become visceral instruments to expose and unravel the hidden struggles of power, the hierarchies of normality, and the constraints of reason. Through wit and sharp satire, she navigates serious topics, weaving humour into complex ideas to make them both relatable and riveting.
The shifting alter egos of the character connect the critical chants to comprehend this impossibility, its destructive legacy of expanded collective memory.
Dedication to Feminine, Alien, Other bodies.
Her dragged body and her burning bones.
Her dyslectic dream of infinite knowledge.
Her dominatrix super power.
Laima Jaunzema is an interdisciplinary choreographer. Her work navigates the unstable terrains between body, language and power. Emerging from the remote peripheries of Latvia, currently based in Riga, she works locally and internationally with shifting formats — from solitary to collective interventions, collaborating across disciplines and geographies.
Creating spaces for reflection and rupture- always seeking to deconstruct hierarchies of knowledge and presence in the field of contemporary performance. She treats choreography as a method of thinking — an embodied poetics that disturbs, reveals, and repairs the transmission — of memory and the still-undiscovered languages of bodies.
Laima has graduated from School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam. Before she has also pursued studies in dance in Berlin and Denmark, and furthered her education in curating contemporary public art at HDK-Valand, Sweden. Laima was granted the Dance Web scholarship, ImPulsTanz 2024.
