Lost State of Mind

Sanaa Lab Artist Residency

Sanaa Lab is an artist residency by Lost Arts Centre, designed to nurture and empower emerging artists and creatives as agents of social change and economic empowerment. The program provides a unique space where artistic exploration meets entrepreneurship, equipping participants with not only advanced creative practice but also essential business and career development skills. Through a combination of workshops, mentorship, peer learning, and public showcases, Sanaa Lab supports artists to develop independent, socially-conscious projects while gaining the tools to sustain a career in the creative economy.

Time	Activity	Facilitator
3:00PM - 3:15PM	Registration & Arrival	Nancy
3:15PM - 3:20PM	Opening Remarks	Sule & Vincent
3:20PM - 3:45PM	Know Your Artist	All Artists
3:45PM - 4:00PM	Guest of Honor	Shalini Bhalla-Lucas
4:00PM - 4:10PM	Hatua za Mjumbe	Eileen Musati
4:10PM - 4:20PM	Blue & Grey	Loven Akinyi
4:30PM - 4:40PM	Becoming	Vincent Odhiambo
4:40PM - 4:50PM	Love Me Not	Michael & Loven
4:50PM - 5:00PM	Lost Circles	Rachael Kamau
5:00PM - 5:10PM	Just an Idea	Loriet Aluoch
5:10PM - 5:20PM	Water	Michael Jonnes
5:20PM - 5:40PM	Q&A	All Artists
5:40PM - 5:50PM	Awards & Recognition	Shalini Bhalla-Lucas
5:50PM - 6:00PM	Feedback & Vote of Thanks	Sule & Vincent

“Hatua Za Mjumbe”

Eileen Musati

She is a dancer who blends rhythm, movement, and storytelling to explore identity and resilience. She uses dance as a language of connection, transformation, and cultural expression

“Blue & Grey”

Loven Akinyi

Lovie is a Kenyan dancer and movement artist whose work blends precision with vulnerability and discipline with release. Through her performances, she explores identity, resilience, and transformation, inviting audiences into moments of honesty and reflection.

“Becoming”

Vincent Odhiambo

Vince Odhiambo is a contemporary dance artist and teacher whose work explores identity, memory, and spirituality through movement. His practice combines expressive choreography with reflective storytelling, using dance as a medium for transformation, creativity, and self-discovery.

“Lost Circles”

Rachael Kamau

Racheal Kamau is a theatre artist, ballet teacher, and contemporary dancer who creates movement that speaks to the soul. Blending classical technique with lived storytelling, she uses dance to inspire connection, reflection, and dialogue.

“Just an Idea”

Loriet Aluoch

Aluoch is a professional dancer based in Nairobi,Kenya. She has 8 years of experience as a dance enthusiast. She tells stories through movement and explores freedom, beauty and abstraction. Her work is inspired by African dance traditions and reimagined in a contemporary form.

“Water”

Michael Jonnes

Michael Jonnes is a passionate dancer who explores diverse movement styles, from hip hop and modern to cultural dance. Rooted in African contemporary, he views dance as both art and belonging, bringing dreams and ideas to life.

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Piece: Hatua Za Mjumbe

This piece bridges past and present through rhythm and movement. The traditional African messenger was trusted to deliver truth without distortion and the modern tap dancer serve as carrier of truth and rhythm. The dance becomes a symbolic journey where interruptions and broken rhythms reflect the obstacles the messenger encounters in life, yet the central message the Rhythm remains steady. Each sound, movement, and pause becomes an act of resilience, ensuring the message endures. In this way, the dancer keeps the message clear and unbroken.

Piece: Blue & Grey

A Day Like This” is a five-minute solo tracing a day in the life of someone living with grief. Through shifting states of stillness and motion, it reflects the heaviness of memory, the fragility of the body in sorrow, and the fleeting gestures of resilience that keep one moving forward. Emotive and raw, the piece seeks to embody what cannot be spoken,inviting the audience to witness grief as both weight and transformation, silence and survival.

Piece: Becoming

Becoming is a solo dance work that explores the fragile tension between desire and delay. Rooted in the universal experience of procrastination, the piece asks: what do we truly become when we keep postponing action? Is this endless waiting an act of free will, or is it shaped by forces beyond us — spiritual, unseen, inevitable? Through looping gestures, interrupted phrases, and cycles of repetition, the dancer embodies the sensation of living in loops — always on the edge of beginning, yet caught in return. The journey moves from hesitation and accumulation into frustration and surrender, culminating in an explosive climax where the loop finally breaks. Both personal and universal, Becoming questions whether procrastination erodes becoming, or paradoxically, defines it.

Piece: Lost Circles

Lost Circles is a contemporary dance piece that explores the silent erosion of Africa’s rich traditions by the rise of digital life. Through movement, the piece reveals how mobile phones though connecting us virtually have disrupted age-old practices of face-to-face storytelling, communal bonding, and shared presence. Once-vibrant circles of elders, children, and families now sit in silence, each lost in their screens. This work is both a mourning and a call—to remember, reconnect, and reclaim the soul of community in an increasingly digital world.

Piece: Just an Idea

Just an Idea’ explores the unpredictable journey of creativity through the body’s movement. It captures how a simple spark of an idea can grow, shift, and unfold into something tangible, yet always open to change. The dance invites the audience to witness the body’s exploration on multiple levels from small, subtle gestures to expansive, full-body expressions. It plays with contrasts,stillness and motion, tension and release and powerful nature of thoughts as they materialize. The stage is marked by one object,a Book symbolizing the origin of ideas, knowledge, and reflection. Through this prop, the piece explores how ideas can bind, guide, or free us

Piece: Water

Water, being one of the basic needs of survival, is at the heart of this piece, which portrays how life revolves around it. Just as a fish cannot breathe without water, human life too is deeply affected—without clean water, survival is impossible. This solo piece is an original work-in-progress, directed and choreographed by Michael Jonnes, who explores dance theatre through his own composition.

Sanaa Lab Artist Residency

COHORT 1 GRADUATION PROGRAM

Meet the Graduating Artists

Eileen Musati

Loven Akinyi

Vincent Odhiambo

Rachael Kamau

Loriet Aluoch

Michael Jonnes

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