Elizabeth Sugawara

Livable Futures graduate student fellow 2022-2024

Intergenerational, Adaptive, and Community Dance, The Ohio State University

Biography

My name is Elizabeth Sugawara (she/they). I am an interdisciplinary artist, experimenter, and improviser. I invite spacious play to the community by looking at access, wellness and agency as creative process and practice. In movement making environments, I am interested in facilitating experience and understanding the relationships to one another in the collaborative space. I facilitate many populations in the Columbus Area including the Youth Program at Flux + Flow Dance and Movement Center, Columbus Dance for Parkinson's, Perennial Movement Group, Memory Care, Assisted Living, and college students at OSU as a Graduate Teaching Associate. There is space for everyone in dance. 

Q & A

What makes more livable futures for you?

Generous play, patience, and curiosity. The presence of daily movement met with softness and listening. Daily adapting, asking myself What feels good today? What is possible today? I am deeply invested in the idea that practice can move slower. Making, facilitating, crafting, building, and understanding how to welcome and invite what is possible today with my collective community of artists, educators, and environment. 

What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?

Here’s my list for this year (2023):

 Reading: 

• The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 

• Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James 

• Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell 

Listening: 

Podcasts that make me smile and laugh out loud: 

✓ Sibling Rivalry with Monet X Change and Bob The Drag Queen 

✓ Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang 

✓ Why Won’t You Date Me? With Nicole Byer 

✓ Finding Our Way with Prentis Hemphill 

Watching: Summer Camp Island, Project Runway: All Stars, Atsuko Okatsuka’s stand-up comedy 

What practices are sustaining you?

→ Long walks outside 

→ laying down in the grass 

→ riding my bike 

→ Laughter