This week, my guest drinks Kashmiri Chai, a pink milk tea she discovered in Karachi, sweet and warming.

Meet Alina Belyagina, a choreographer who works from the periphery on purpose.

From West Siberia to Kyiv, Moscow, Katowice, and now Munich, Alina has spent her career at the margins of contemporary dance infrastructure. For her, the periphery is "a condition, a space without resources, without infrastructure, sometimes without understanding." And it's also a strategy for staying "critical, inventive, and connected to what's missing."

Her new work, Giving back the Blessings, places two politically charged traditions in conversation: vogue culture born from Black and Latinx queer ballroom resistance, and Slavic folk dance with its codes of gender and national identity. Both are competitive, rule-bound, and emerge from communities navigating oppression.

What drew her to pair them is her noticing similar patterns in both forms. "I'm fascinated by how the movement mutates, how dancers decolonize themselves, how the movement itself migrates." The crawl, the duckwalk, virtuosic turns, the forms mirror each other in unexpected ways.

Alina rejects easy categories. She works with practices she "sometimes cannot (and don't want to) name." Her approach is less about what the body represents and more about how it's embedded in "a network of things, sounds, textures, politics, and meanings."

📖 On her nightstand: Melancology: Black Metal and Ecology by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, exploring the intersection of extreme music, philosophy, and environmental thought. Also, Missy Magazine, a feminist pop culture publication blending politics and pleasure.

📺 On her screen: Sirät, by Oliver Laxe. A film that opens with ravers stacking giant speakers like skyscrapers in the Moroccan desert, then pivots from the search for a missing daughter into makeshift utopia at the edge of societal collapse, euphoria and devastation as twin poles holding everything together.

🎧 Listening to: Mira Mann, an artist operating across poetry, music, and performance, holding punk and verse together, addressing sex, illness, motherhood, and violence without flinching.

📍 Place: Boekie Woekie, the artist-run bookstore for books by artists in Amsterdam. A space where artists make books and books make artists, where the line between reading and making dissolves.

🍲 Dish: Silken tofu chocolate mousse, comfort that doesn't announce itself.

🎟️ Activity: Preparing for Last Ship residency in Khajuraho, India. Her strongest recent experience: celebrating Sindhi Cultural Day in Karachi, dancing together in the streets.

Read her full interview:

Find her on Instagram

Thank you for joining us for this chai. Until next week! 🩷

Warmly,
Jana Al Ob.
Founding Editor