Ahilan Ratnamohan is a choreographer, actor and performance artist who works with forms considered unorthodox in theatre. After studying film at Sydney’s University of Technology, he pursued a career as a professional footballer in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. It’s via this path that he ended up in Belgium in 2013.
The themes broached in Ahilan’s work are always rooted in his experience as an emigrated former top athlete. Sport and language are central to the work, in other words. A number of years back, his search for the cultural and choreographic potential of football resulted in a dance style he developed called Klapping. For this, Ahilan worked primarily with performers who were not classically trained, creating a project that served to connect various different communities and subcultures. Since 2020, Ahilan has been researching the performativity of language acquisition at Antwerp’s Royal Conservatoire. A self-proclaimed ‘language addict’, Ahilan is always learning at least two languages. The duality between his native English – not the mother tongue of his Sri Lankan parents – and his time spent living in various places abroad, makes him an expert-by-experience in his own research.
In recent years, Ahilan has performed across Europe as well as in Australia, Brazil and South Africa. He is an artist-in-residence at Brussels’ Kaaitheater and is part of the artist collective Robin.
He is kicking off his partnership with Vincent Company with the monologue Alle woorden die ik nog niet kende (‘All the words I never knew’).