Sharka Rey is a Czech-born and Basel-based psychosomatic sex educator and performance artist.
From 2009 to 2012, Sharka studied psychology and counselling theory at West London University, which helped her differentiate subtle aspects of the human psyche and its processes.
She received her yoga teaching qualification in India in 2013 and was invited to teach at the same school, Bindusar Yoga School Rishikesh, immediately afterward. She then moved to the Philippines, where she created a yoga community and regular “Weekend Well-Being Retreats” in Sibulan. From 2014 to 2017, she organized and directed the annual “Contact Improvisation Event in the Philippines” with international teachers, introducing this form of alternative movement practice to local communities. Additionally, she worked on human empowerment at the local detention center and with sexually abused women using tools such as movement therapy, yoga, meditation, and general psychology.
In 2015, she moved her base to Berlin, from where she began teaching retreats and workshops internationally in England, Spain, Holland, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, and the Philippines.
Since 2019, Sharka has been living in Switzerland, where she opened a venue called ThePlace2BE, a multidisciplinary space for art, body practices, discussions, workshops, exhibitions, and talks. The existence of this place came to a halt due to the pandemic.
Her work as a psychosomatic sex educator as well as her performance art pieces have been shaped and influenced by studies of psychology, social sciences, and extensive trainings and practices of bdsm, yoga, tantra, tao, chi gong, contact improvisation, theatre improvisation, meditation, breathwork, various bodywork styles, and capoeira. Since 2022, she has been exploring her voice through experimental art forms such as Roy Hart Theatre and Open Voice by Komala Amorini, accessing different voices, sounds, and unexpressed archetypal parts inside the body without hierarchically assigning them to binary stereotypes—beautiful and ugly, good or bad.
Sharka’s main interest lies in exploring “realness” in encounters (on and off stage), including its magic, boundaries, and limits. She also likes to research dynamics of power and emotions, deconstruct identities, and construct new ones. In her current studies of social sciences at Basel University, she focuses on sexual culture, art practice, and “epistemological disobedience,” meaning to delink from the illusion of the zero-point epistemology and open space for more than one truth.
Since 2015, she has been almost annually involved at Xplore festivals as either a workshop facilitator or a performer at the immersive play space “School of Love,” engaging in psychosomatic, theatrical, improvised, participatory long-play durational interventions. This year, she is happy to curate one of the Xplore spaces and create magic with and for you.
Music: Alain Meyer
Alain (they/them) currently lives in Basel and moves between music, performance and audio. Interested in the possibilities of shared spaces, collective processes and DIY approaches, Alain uses sound, improvisation and poetry as central tools. They is active in various music projects, currently playing bass in the bands ‘Super Lou’ and ‘Nichtsdestotrotz’. As technical support in local self-organised concert venues and as a solo artist (OIOX), Alain plays long improvised sets on the modular synthesizer, blurring the boundaries between ambient, club music and experimental. The focus is on how music and sound can create environments and new ways of relating.
Raised in an evangelical Christian church, Alain’s early childhood was spent in London, Manila and Basel, and today Alain’s own work is concerned with finding novel ways of relating to the body, religion and ritual that are outside of a dominant and oppressive culture. Alain seeks to heal and transform the own confusion and the trauma of the evangelical upbringing through art, poetry and collective processes.
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