https://touchingmargins.com touchingmargins Wed, 06 Jul 2022 10:04:59 +0000 https://touchingmargins.com en https://touchingmargins.com/HOME Wed, 06 Jul 2022 10:04:59 +0000 touchingmargins https://touchingmargins.com/HOME Dear familiar and existing dance archive, We ask you to forget what you know and to look beyond. Beyond conservative techniques and biased narratives. Beyond masculine dominance and Eurocentrism. What else exists besides famous and well-studied names? During a two-day symposium, we gather to share practices and exchange views on how our diverse array of histories inform our dance-making. Moving Margins is an alter-archive and educational platform for diverse dance practitioners and researchers to exchange and elaborate upon the possible encounters of a variety of dance histories. The project attempts to create a sustainable yet flexible network of knowledge around the shared interest in dance history and the desire to expand it beyond its dominant narrative. With a focus on people and practices outside of the North American and Western European canon, we aim to establish a more relevant, complete, controversial, and uncomfortable picture of dance history. <img width="2658" height="1772" width_o="2658" height_o="1772" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2c9d9310bb20cf0194907bd54ae7dad10eb92711ecebb7f409db3f860bb03cd2/Three-Suns-_MG_0604---15.jpg" data-mid="213072470" border="0" data-scale="63" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2c9d9310bb20cf0194907bd54ae7dad10eb92711ecebb7f409db3f860bb03cd2/Three-Suns-_MG_0604---15.jpg" /> In 2024 Touching Margins alter-archive stepped out of the website and took place at Galerie Wedding - Space for Contemporary Art As part of&nbsp; the exhibition THREE SUNS, curated by Nitsan Margaliot, Malte Pieper, and Maja Smoszna; and alongside works by Salwa Aleryani, Maryna Makarenko, and Anastasia Pilepchuk. The visitors were invited to listen, read and reflect on the first chapter of our project, where Berlin based dance artists share about their research and practice dealing with under-represented dance heritages.Galerie Wedding – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst Müllerstraße 146/147 13353 Berlin THREE SUNS 07.06 - 24.08.2024 https://galeriewedding.de/three-suns/ © Image by Wataru Murakami <img width="1969" height="623" width_o="1969" height_o="623" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0fe41aeb5a095df3db6ce58e810ef08a57fc601ae3008bc4cdc293690a3bbfa8/moving-margines-symp-Press.jpg" data-mid="157848680" border="0" data-scale="66" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0fe41aeb5a095df3db6ce58e810ef08a57fc601ae3008bc4cdc293690a3bbfa8/moving-margines-symp-Press.jpg" /> &nbsp; Touching Margins &nbsp;Moving MarginsMoving Margins Chapter II https://touchingmargins.com/Agata Thu, 02 Dec 2021 14:18:38 +0000 touchingmargins https://touchingmargins.com/Agata Agata Siniarska Artistic Profile Research“archiving as companionship” Agata Siniarska’s research project “Archiving as companionship”, outlines the differences between evidence and history, between fact and fiction, in an attempt to separate the truth from the lie. Telling the truth about history has both political and material consequences. Archives are exclusionary collections, monuments to specific power configurations. Stories that are not considered 'noteworthy' are not archived and what is not in the archive does not exist. In this way, the colonies established their right to new territories by bringing their archives with them. The purpose of this was to root newcomers in unknown land that did not belong to them, as well as establishing sovereignty, transforming the land into territory. Archives have always been a place of policy-making, of creating formal narratives and a tool to privilege specific stories and people. Archives record, classify, locate, allow, censor and mark. Archives are not a neutral tool, but a deliberate political action. All technologies in the archives, such as passports, maps, documents confirming nationality and origin, and thus the right or lack of right to a particular history, act as mechanisms to force a specific vision of the world, a hierarchic world in which one has an inviolable, meticulously engraved place. How do these documents connect?&nbsp; How are they separated from each other? In what arrangement are the numbers in the catalogue, hierarchies, collections, groups, subgroups? Is the fact that they lie together on a shelf already considered a community? Do the files lying next to one another talk to each other? REMAINING OTHERWISE What are the ephemera carriers that extend archiving practices beyond the phallocentric emphasis on visibility, sound recording and documentation? How do we bring new materials into the sphere of archives, and thus a different aesthetic sensitivity, in order to create a new format with new attributes that are not reduced to the sum of the heterogeneous elements mobilised to create it? Other archives, is a movement not only 'for' movement, but also 'against' movement. This movement resists the dominant systems of aesthetics and institutional classification. When we meet other archives, we build our own choreographies, our own relations, our own emotions, and store them in our personal archive of stories within our bodies. Other archives are not isolated units, they are more like oceanic whirlpools. Each document is a singular dynamic movement, dissolving in a complex, fluid circulation. They move in time and space - body to body, to body, to body. The question 'what is' is never enough. 'How' is it like? 'Where' is it? 'When' is it? - are choreographies of their common relations. Every body in the archive is a threshold, a transition between the past and the future. Other archives reject the ontological division between 'thing' and 'transition', between 'body' and 'vector'. The timeliness of Other archives is a time of delay, duplicated time, duration, time of return. All this time of thinking, which opens up the whole spectrum between the time saved and lost. Agata is reminded that her human time is simply one of many modes of temporality. She recognises the body as the carrier of other archives. The body is both human and non-human, organic and inorganic. The body stores deep memories that feed its cells like streams with sources beyond our reach. In the case of archiving, the body takes the form of a document. It records the effects of a force field, storing these forces in its physical, mental, somatic structures. Continuously subject to change, our bodies and their movements, speak without words. The encounter between bodies is often pertaining on the surface, on the skin. The skin is a place of contact and communication. It is a place where dialogues are recorded. It is also a place of borderline, between one story and another, yet fluid. Though Agata cannot cross certain boundaries, she can stretch them and move them. This is the essence of a vigilant and sensitive encounter with another species. Of course, her perspective always remains the human perspective, but saying that, she undermines the sense of the learning process. Meeting a new species opens spaces to new relationships and apparatus with which she was not familiar before. She, of course, continues to impose her ways of thinking, but attempts to keep them open enough to work well with those who offer unknown worlds. Other archives is transcorporal, transcriptional, and in constant transformation. There is no space without a story. Every landscape is written, from body to body. To be able to speak, over one hundred different muscles of the chest, neck, jaw, tongue and lips must work together. Every word or short phrase physically pronounced is the result of a unique system of muscle movements. Stories are complex physical actions, large enough to accommodate the complexity of the world, and open up new, amazing relationships. There is no difference between written and embodied language - writing is an embodied act, acting is a discursive act. Oral transmission does not comply with the rules of ownership, possession, dictated by the official archive. Official archives often classify oral history as a primitive practice (a standard archive cannot read other records than its own and is therefore primitive). We often hear that telling stories is a universal experience in all nations, cultures, and societies. Unfortunately, most often we hear this version from the dominant perspective, which assumes the right to tell the stories of the colonized and oppressed, stories which have been reinterpreted and presented from a violent perspective. Hence, our encounter with the archives cannot be a one-way street. Archives influence our way of seeing the world and thus our relationship with our archives are of great importance. Scores are both verbal text, a collection of images and other types of documents, developed partly as a new means of communication, usually between the choreographer and the dancers. Scores allow for reinterpretation of a choreography, not dominated by the choreographer-author. It is a material that does not impose the 'truth', but is open to play. For Anna Halprin, the score becomes a way of sharing creativity and demystifying it so that everyone can participate. Lisa Nelson describes scores as “not documents but sets of shared agreements which provide a communication and feedback system for an ensemble of players.” Scores prepared with the participation of all bodies open the archives to uncertainty, instability and vigilance. Standard archives assume that if performative practices are not passed on for tangible documentation, they will be irretrievably lost. Dance always remains. The dancing body is its own archive. A body dancing at the moment of its performance produces a 'live notation'. So how does dance remain when there is no notation written down, when the dance does not conform to standard documentation? It is important to distinguish between dance and its stage performance and dance as a practice. Of course, a dance performed on stage may disappear. There are remains of many outstanding choreographies which make it impossible to recreate the entire performance. It is not without reason that the Balanchine Foundation founded 'The Archive of Lost Choreography', which tries to save the remains of specific dance performances. Dance as a practice does not disappear as long as it is practiced and developed, passed from body to body, from generation to generation. The act of disappearance of individual dances is an objection to commodification, against the fetish of leaving an artifact, thus dance is probably the most ecological practice of art. Dance as a practice does not find its purpose in the final result of the produced work, but in the process of research (practice as research). Even when the dance is presented on stage, the research continues. Dance interferes with the process of commodification and participation in the system of economic exchange and thus interferes with capitalist exchange systems. The tendency for dance to disappear also opposes the ideological imposition of a sanctioned version of dance history and traditional historiography, which masks its own construction with relations of power and domination of certain aesthetic tendencies. Bio Archives. Since the beginning of mankind, the number of people born has exceeded 107 billion, of which 7 billion live and the remaining 100 billion are dead. The land on which we live has a humic basis. Decaying bodies affect the chemical composition of the earth, water and air, over time becomes fossils. Organic remains are a connecting element, mixing species and supporting symbiotic relations between organisms. The human body, in this case, has no other status in the decomposition process. Decomposition knows no hierarchy or boundaries. Soil systems deal with dead bodies in exactly the same way as with any other form of organic substance, storing its history and assigning it to a new community. The earth therefore has a documentary function. From layer to layer, from body to body, it is an archive of incarnate history from which the human subject cannot escape. Other archives do not reject one format in favor of another, one look in favor of another, one point in space, one way of time. Other archives are the whole spectrum of situations and circulation. All forms of archiving are necessary, it only depends on how they are used and what relationships they build. The aim of such an archive is to open up to symbolic meanings, metaphors, visions, images, experiences, cognitive processes that integrate the emotions and values that "cultivate" the imagination, blurring the boundaries between science, art and politics. CHOREOGRAPHY AS AN ARCHIVING TOOL For Agata, choreography is a tool for reading, building, writing, creating, noticing and revealing relationships. This very broad definition is a way of thinking for Other archives, that focuses on how individual elements interact with each other, and how and what the archives may activate in us. Choreography reveals a system of movement. A moving body is not a spontaneous body. The body is a vessel of repeated movements and known patterns that reveal its education, social background, physical and political attitudes. Choreography reveals ways of using the body in time and space. Choreography is a processional cartography, a moving architecture that is present in constantly changing relationships and dialogues with other bodies. Choreography deals not only with human bodies, non-human bodies and their movements, but rather with an ever-changing set of relationships and qualities between them, mediated by spaces and structures, from the human body to man-made climate change, from the cellular scale of a single body to clusters of many bodies. Choreography multiplies on many levels. When looking at a dancing body recording its choreography, one makes another choreography of their own.&nbsp; When looking at the dancing body on stage, these two choreographies are part of another choreography, social choreography and so on, all the way up to planetary choreography. Choreography is a process of constantly negotiated relations. The procedural category is still neglected in the contemporary normative perspective, rejecting relational and situational links with inhuman existence and the world. These relationships exist everywhere on our planet, many times in places perceived as peripheral, in the dead zone of the Eurocentric perspective and discourse. In the words of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The globe is on our computers, but no one lives here.” The human experience of space happens with and through the body, hence the knowledge coming out of choreography should not be limited to this medium alone, but should become a practice of writing a common history in which humanity lives and shares space with different forms of existence, exploring the entangled experience of social structures through movement, through performative, bodily, movement-based and sensory strategies and processes. All bodies exist in relation: in relation to and through interaction with other bodies, opening our working methods and perspectives to collective knowledge. Choreographies suggest a reorientation of the practice towards the creation and modulation of assemblages which associate materially heterogeneous types of human and non-human activities. Choreography is a key area of politics. By challenging central categories such as rhythm, strength, space, time, energy, dynamics and flow, it sheds light on the kinetic foundations of contemporary society. What are the tasks of the archive today, at a time of extinction? What are archives in times of extinction? What is extinction? What is this event? Climate, hydrological and anthropogenic changes have occurred and are occurring in ecosystems around the world. One of the adverse, progressive changes are the impoverishment of biodiversity. It is characterised by the slow disappearance of individual animal populations and plants. This is not a problem that belongs to distant continents, but a global problem, including Poland. Although all activities in these areas have a strong impact on other parts of the globe, this is an overlooked topic, absent from the Polish public debate. The extinction of species, a collective death, is a kind of tangled mass grave transformed in time, an event without a monument, without memory and social awareness. The absence of the memory of disappearing individual species of flora and fauna is an archive of silent stories, unnoticed traces, without a voice. However, with the abstractness of its description, extinction is never a general event, it is always a phenomenon that requires ways of meeting and understanding that transcend disciplines. The archive is in fact a death zone - a place where the living and the dead meet and permeate. The roles of humans in the extinction of fauna and flora are very complex. There are many ways in which human communities are affected and suffer from extinction yet they are usually not present in political discussion. Discussions take place somewhere else, outside the extinction zone, without relations to extinction. How can new relationships with species, taking into account biocultural complexities, revitalise and reconfigure the possibilities for reaction and responsibility? How can we think of the documented history of mankind and history’s unwritten stories of the landscape together? How can we think of materiality and human stories as one, in a world where we suffer from the lack of a common world, where we have lost a common orientation, a common direction. Agata Siniarska&nbsp;works within the field of dance and choreography. She places her practice between how we think about and move in the world. It is a place where somatics and politics intersect. A place where body perception meets social engagement, between somatic and environmental landscapes, between human and non-human bodies. http://cargocollective.com/agatasiniarska https://touchingmargins.com/Amelia Fri, 10 Dec 2021 17:11:42 +0000 touchingmargins https://touchingmargins.com/Amelia Amelia Uzategui&nbsp;Bonilla Artistic Profile Research“The Erotic as Destabilizing Vitality” “The Erotic as Destabilizing Vitality” stems from Amelia's engagement with the Afro-Peruvian dances which she learnt as a child. Her involvement in creation-based dance companies such as Luis Antonio Vílchez’s Adú Proyecto Universal and Carmen Román’s Cunamacué cultivated her knowledge and practices further into her adult years. This research recognizes the transmission of Afro-Peruvian improvisational dance practices available through conversation, social practice, and literature. As a student, Amelia learned several dance styles (landó, festejo, marinera, zapateo). These dances were passed down by generations of Afro-Peruvian musicians and dancers and later formulated into choreographies for the stage by artists such as Victoria Santa Cruz (1922-2014) and the internationally touring company, Perú Negro. These dances were taught to Amelia as steps, which formed choreographies. However the history and social practice of these dances raise the importance and elusiveness of the Afro-Peruvian dances’ central element; improvisation. Amelia's U.S. American upbringing brought about a rationally-thinking mind that became perplexed and even fearful in these moments of improvisation. Notions of “feeling” the music, notably the Peruvian drum (el cajón), did not seem as precise as other Western dance techniques that the studied. She later realised that they must understand the music in a different way. As a Peruvian dancer in diaspora, they asks, what is improvisation from an Afro-Peruvian perspective and what is valued in this spontaneously-created movement beyond mimicry or virtuosity? <img width="1080" height="1350" width_o="1080" height_o="1350" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b63edf1c13562ebb1a39fc4cb0f11eee698033bea72bdae432538b6ee6213345/41685492_1981549271907777_490023895521296384_n.jpg" data-mid="127160613" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b63edf1c13562ebb1a39fc4cb0f11eee698033bea72bdae432538b6ee6213345/41685492_1981549271907777_490023895521296384_n.jpg" /> Within the Moving Margin’s platform, Amelia proposes to give care to her confused inner-teenager, reclaiming&nbsp; the social and literary sources of her dance heritage, and rethinking the division between choreography and dance improvisation. They muses over the historical cultural baggage of racism in her family which implies that as a person of mixed African heritage, she did not learn to identify herself as black, but rather as white. She did not learn Quechua, spoken by her Grandfather in Huancayo but instead learned Spanish and other dominant languages. As a young adult, Amelia studied ballet and modern dance, not Festejo. Yet the foods that they ate and music that she listened to with her family are infused with Peru’s Afro-Indigenous presence. &nbsp; Racist power structures tend towards minimizing the contributions of Afro-Indigenous dance heritage. Thus, the Moving Margins research project is, for Amelia, a radical act of remembrance Symposium PresentationCiting dances that were re-interpreted and recreated in the Afro-Peruvian cultural revival movement of the second half of the 20th century, the presentation of this research seeks to invite movers into their creative selves, finding their own way of dancing to polyrhythmic musics, historical textbooks for negated cultural heritage. The archive is in the living bodies who create and recreate movement that responds to the music with all senses alive and present. In our current dance discourse, this may be called a score-based, somatic approach. Audre Lorde eloquently describes this from a Black Feminist understanding in the essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power.” These dances source feeling and sensing to the point of overriding society's imposed logic, seeking liberation. The act of recreating these dances with our contemporary bodies swerves the colonial practice of respecting tradition to the point of cementing them in a grave. Biography On and off stage, Amelia Uzategui Bonilla chambea para la descolonización de la danza and is currently based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She works alongside Mareike Uhl, co-leading Frankfurt's Tanzhaus Frankfurt Rhine-Main and guest lectures at the Frankfurt University for Music and Performing Arts. They seek to recognize negated stories from the African diaspora and Native communities in Abya Yala. Though she spent most of her professional years in the West, Amelia reclaims epistemologies from the South as part of their culture and artistic identity. She amplifies the work of collaborators and colleagues who destabilize the coloniality of power in “contemporary dance.” List of links from above: Antonio - Arts Innovator: Luis Antonio Vilchez, Peru - Americas Quarterly Carmen - CubaCaribe 2017: Mis Manos, Cunamacué on Vimeo Victoria - Victoria Santa Cruz | Hammer Museum (ucla.edu) Peru Negro - Eva Ayllón &amp; Perú Negro - "Taita Guaranguito" - YouTube Credit: Cunamacué's "Son de los Diablos" in Oakland, California, 2018. Photos by Jaime Lyons. <img width="867" height="1403" width_o="867" height_o="1403" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d2d49b83ea0728185e5cf3b2c1f691c765190a3df70db4319541347daf25eb8d/351c64e4-8272-4336-bcd7-04bbf8d7670c.JPG" data-mid="127160828" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/867/i/d2d49b83ea0728185e5cf3b2c1f691c765190a3df70db4319541347daf25eb8d/351c64e4-8272-4336-bcd7-04bbf8d7670c.JPG" /> https://touchingmargins.com/Bianca Wed, 08 Dec 2021 21:59:25 +0000 touchingmargins https://touchingmargins.com/Bianca Bianca Figl&nbsp; Artistic Profile Research“Metamorphose and Transformation” Bianca's research project Metamorphose and Transformation explores how material archives can feed into one’s creative process. Having worked in an ethnographic museum, she was often exposed to debates concerning the restitution of objects acquired in the heydays of European colonialism and certain construction and categorization of the world. Her project observes what kinds of knowledge have not been included into certain historical archive canons. Most of Bianca's movement practice and training is based on various Indonesian dance styles, where traces of complex histories of post-independent Indonesia can be found. As she now resides in Vienna, Austria she decided to seek points of connection between her local archives and beyond. As a starting point Bianca delves into works by Richard Teschner (born March 22, 1879, in Karlsbad, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary; † July 4, 1948, in Vienna). Teschner was an artist of the Viennese Art Nouveau, artisan in the Wiener Werkstätte and puppeteer. He transferred the art of Javanese figure/wayang theater into the context and time of Viennese modernism. <img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/aQcL2yWdcwYGfZ3yZvhSElTPmo12F9urX7Ab6BcKXOvEwPhrw7T17P74EmMvCSsLUOgnwlBtZICBuTVPJCvMCnyYwxTEBXI6U0zo9AS58FSnTLy5ro7ByjeS2Q0_9S3jET9hbRo5" width="602" height="339" style="width: 602px; height: 339px;" data-scale="100"> © KHM-Museumsverband The presentation at the Moving Margins symposiums will give an introduction and insight into the first findings. <img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/LOLaUjU5kOgaFScOb-mSqM1CRe98QMuzJa-6VSp4BcYMC-25pJScQ6mlxd93vzcYJaBLbVu-V_7Vs-ylz6jiC-WqnbmLDr-Mzw6wXs3VjmcCTneQy-nwsbuUr5HayZGXpJX5OfY_" width="526" height="701" style="width: 526px; height: 701px;" data-scale="100"> Performance of ‘Nawang Wulan’ at the Theatermuseum Vienna, Nov 2021 Bianca Mayasari Figl realises projects in collaboration with colleagues from various disciplines at the interface of dance/research/education/archive. From 2012-2020 she worked at the Weltmuseum Wien in the field of program development, education and outreach. Bianca completed studies in Japanese Studies / Art History (AT), Classical / Traditional Dance (IDN), Arts &amp; Heritage Studies (NL), Contemporary Dance Performance (IRL). In 2007 and 2009 she was awarded a scholarship for the studies of Dance at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta and in 2019 at the Akademie der Künste Berlin “What the Body Remembers. Dance Heritage today ”. Currently undertaking a PhD in Arts Practice Research at the University of Limerick (IRL). She works as a lecturer at the University of Vienna on Museum/Education and as a curator at the ArtSocialSpace Brunnenpassage. https://touchingmargins.com/Christelle-Ahia Thu, 02 Dec 2021 13:46:15 +0000 touchingmargins https://touchingmargins.com/Christelle-Ahia Christelle Kamanan Artistic Profile Research “the Transatlantic cultural Memory” It is often said that Caribbean, or even dances from the Americas, such as dancehall, salsa or breakdance stem from African culture. Christelle Kamanans research project, “The Transatlantic Cultural Memory '' questions how this transmission happened? She asks what these african cultural roots look like, how they have kept on living until today and where this cultural legacy is still observed? Christelle began this journey about 10 years ago while studying Languages and Civilisations. Later, it became more empiric through her practice of Afro-Cuban dance, simultaneously resurfacing her West African move practices. By navigating herself through her personal cultural legacy she expanded her research to the Caribbean and the Americas. This project is an invitation to travel through time, history and across the rivers of the Atlantic Ocean. Historical background to find in the presented results; The Transatlantic human trade and enslavement are the key focus explaining this cultural transportation. However, I also look at the period of time before that to overview the already existing cultural practices. Then, it briefly goes to the XXth century to end with what can be observed now. Map of Slave Trade from Africa to the Americas 1650-1860 Geographical area of focus of the current results; On one hand, the Atlantic African coast from Senegal until Angola, with spotlights on: - the Ivory Coast/Ghana area - Benin/Nigeria area - and Angola/DRC/Congo area (former Kingdom of Kongo) On the other hand: - Salvador de Baiha (Brazil) - Cuba - San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia) - New Orleans, Louisiana (USA) - Haïti - Martinique/Guadeloupe (France) These countries are said to hold the largest African descendant’s population outside of Africa. Martinique &amp; Guadeloupe is particularly interesting being that they are territories of the EU. In reflection of this concept one major question arises; How can transmission and learning happen, when there are no material archives available? The deported and enslaved people didn’t carry any belongings with them. So, what were their teachings? How did they share methods that they had brought from Africa? Indeed they were raised with the rich oral African traditions. This project introduces some of them. - griot What is a griot? - storytelling What is a storyteller and the difference with a griot? - singing - dancing (and other creative practices) On the learning side, there are: - peer-to-peer learning groups - mentoring - initiation groups - repetition and memorising techniques Organised groups enable one to get general knowledge and the most specific one, that should be passed on to the next generation. Looking at it through music:An interesting exhibition that I visited in Amsterdam a few years ago: Rythm and Roots at the Tropen Museum (Amsterdam). Trailer (Dutch): https://youtu.be/GEILBLTgEsc Interview with the Africa Curator of the Tropenmuseum: https://youtu.be/RN-_Rkuz5gY (Dutch with English automated subtitles)From 3’15 to 4’12 she speaks about the travel of rumba between the Kingdom of Kongo and Cuba, then back to Congo. Christelle Ahia Kamanan&nbsp;is a French and Ivorian creative, involved in writing and dancing. After Modern Jazz, hip hop dance, and Afro-Cuban dance, Christelle Ahia continues expanding her West African dance skills. She is the founder and editor of the cultural online media AMANIE, sharing artistic news from the worldwide African diaspora. Read more on her website: http://caml-k.com/http://whenthedrumscall.info/ <img width="960" height="1280" width_o="960" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e5048ea1f3e43dbe8e096fc197b07ddd0e14da828ed2ccfeb196e38533879c47/cuba-dancer.jpg" data-mid="126347937" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/960/i/e5048ea1f3e43dbe8e096fc197b07ddd0e14da828ed2ccfeb196e38533879c47/cuba-dancer.jpg" /> Cuban dancer <img width="640" height="480" width_o="640" height_o="480" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/834b6e10ac2db9b7d24ab08924be1f639c2b079be20716672baf1713663d2df9/dancers-Colombia.jpg" data-mid="126300670" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/640/i/834b6e10ac2db9b7d24ab08924be1f639c2b079be20716672baf1713663d2df9/dancers-Colombia.jpg" />Colombian dancers <img width="1275" height="1920" width_o="1275" height_o="1920" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/59d34fa720765bcbacfe89e2ad6f924837fda91d728998ee0c85bb83f5bf3c39/dancers_Yoruba.jpg" data-mid="126301157" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/59d34fa720765bcbacfe89e2ad6f924837fda91d728998ee0c85bb83f5bf3c39/dancers_Yoruba.jpg" />Yoruba dancers https://touchingmargins.com/Sasha Mon, 20 Sep 2021 16:32:07 +0000 touchingmargins https://touchingmargins.com/Sasha Sasha Portyannikova Artistic ProfileResearch “Soviet Gesture translated” “Soviet Gesture translated” is the next iteration of a research project between Sasha Portyannikova and Dasha Plokhova (Isadorino Gore dance cooperative), that has been taken place since 2015. Their aim is to elaborate on an entrance point into a heritage of which little is known and yet carries the burden of subsequent tragedies, to share the discoveries with non-Russian speaking audiences. This iteration relies greatly on The Manual for the Practical Use of a Dance Archive: Experiments in Choreology, or Where the Soviet Gesture Has Led Us, that is a “… a hybrid publication that comprises of both documentation of the laboratory's work and detailed instructions on how to conduct research through dancing. It is “an instruction, a game, an archive, a protocol, a score to perform contemporary dance. It also operates as a bold proposal for a method to document a dance research process, the dominant component of which is the nonverbal practice of bodily experience of historical concepts and dilemmas.” – Anastasia Mityushina, Public Program curator at the Garage MCA (Moscow). The object of the research is an archive of the Choreological Laboratory of the State Academy of Artistic sciences.The academy was active from 1923 to 1929. This was a very particular period of Soviet history in Moscow as after the revolution, before Stalin’s dictatorship was established, there was a period of New Economic Policy. wiki: The New Economic Policy (NEP) was an economic policy of the Soviet Union proposed by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 as a temporary expedient. Lenin characterized the NEP in 1922 as an economic system that would include "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control," while socialized state enterprises would operate on "a profit basis.” &lt;…&gt;&nbsp; Josep Stalin abandoned the NEP in 1928 with the Great Break More info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy#End_of_NEP Not surprisingly, the world's famous Russian Avant-garde shares the same time-frame with this New Economic Policy. State academy of Artistic Sciences (ГАХН) had a branchy and impressive structure:<img width="1492" height="904" width_o="1492" height_o="904" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1434d484d820d0a13890d2effdc1d2bef56e973836d12909dcde8f5d1f04f480/Screen-Shot-2021-09-20-at-10.29.50-PM.png" data-mid="119424647" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1434d484d820d0a13890d2effdc1d2bef56e973836d12909dcde8f5d1f04f480/Screen-Shot-2021-09-20-at-10.29.50-PM.png" />Structure of Academy (in Russian and French). Retrieved from https://gachn.de/ru/main/18/ <img width="4222" height="3365" width_o="4222" height_o="3365" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fe4ba5d12b3cc5694627b0594da0820ea4b8ed79cb85c76a553fdc05a0af8991/schemaGachn.rus.jpg" data-mid="119424480" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fe4ba5d12b3cc5694627b0594da0820ea4b8ed79cb85c76a553fdc05a0af8991/schemaGachn.rus.jpg" />Structure of Academy (in Russian and French). Retrieved from https://gachn.de/ru/main/18/ The majority of the documents in the Archive of Choreological Laboratory are texts: <img width="2859" height="4421" width_o="2859" height_o="4421" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5c3952fd19a6630c8d30403f0d1e87e727442ad9ecb70d740b89b009484f5a45/941-17-3-18.jpg" data-mid="119424896" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5c3952fd19a6630c8d30403f0d1e87e727442ad9ecb70d740b89b009484f5a45/941-17-3-18.jpg" /> Larionov’s working plan of the Choreological Laboratory of the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences. May, 13, 1923
Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI)Meanwhile there are also schemes and sketches: <img width="3645" height="2647" width_o="3645" height_o="2647" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7b3b7a947cf9eea6f7a73c38caf840f1babea812f0ac9a1ad5cffbf922ed18f6/941-17-2-10.jpg" data-mid="119424930" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7b3b7a947cf9eea6f7a73c38caf840f1babea812f0ac9a1ad5cffbf922ed18f6/941-17-2-10.jpg" /> Example of movement notation, December 1, 1923Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI)* The first raw: diagram of seed germination The core of the work was an extraction of the bizarre and mysterious terms from archival texts, in order to use them as tasks or proposals for movement practice. Examples of terms: Artistic HygienePlastic ChordKink Movement MotifsOpposing of different expression modesTransition from purely formal to expressive movementExpressive gesture of the elevated legSmooth rhythmic movementPresence and absence of a gestureSensing-inDr. Faddeev – member of the academy and active participant of the Choreological Laboratory insisted: Books about Soviet Dance Expriments:Misler N. The Russian Art of Movement (eng) – https://gachn.de/files/data/Misler.Movement.pdf Sirotkina I., Smith R. The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde: Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Arts in Revolutionary Russia https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Sense-Avant-Garde-Kinaesthesia-Revolutionary/dp/1350014311 “Artistic is understood &lt;..&gt; as a phenomenon capable to tone up the body” For more info about this project go here www.sashaportyannikova.com/soviet-gesture Sasha Portyannikova Graduated from Vaganova Ballet Academy (MA’2013), co-founded dance cooperative Isadorino Gore with Dasha Plokhova in 2012, became Fulbright Visiting Scholar in 2018 and danceWeber in 2019. Participated in international scholarship programs with residences in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Scotland, Spain and USA. Cooperated with Amnesty International, Goethe Institute, V-A-C Foundation, ZKM, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow Museum of Modern Art and others. Sasha creates dances, curates projects, teaches dance in Academia and primary school. She considers dance as a cultural, social, political and research practice. https://touchingmargins.com/Nitsan Thu, 11 Nov 2021 15:23:37 +0000 touchingmargins https://touchingmargins.com/Nitsan Nitsan Margaliot Artistic Profile Research “being with” I was wandering around, talking on the phone, as I like to do. My collaborators, Sasha and Alex were on the other end. It was a warm day. I pushed a foldable bike with one hand as I walked. Alex told us of her desires to investigate a topic that was not of her expertise. I felt a similar wish. We imagined this project as a space where we could experiment with ideas and invent practices, not knowing exactly where we were headed but figuring it out along the way. I decided to put in focus a subject that I had been curious to explore for a while but hadn't done so as it had felt just too intimate, too private. My middle name, Abraham, was a name given to me in honor of an ancestor whom I had never met. My grandfather was born Adolf Margaliot in 1920 in Chemnitz. At the age of 18, during The Holocaust he ran away to Palestine-Israel, changing his name to Abraham. Abraham Margaliot was one of the first Holocaust researchers in Israel. ‘Being with’ shifts between multiple practices of gathering, collaging, questioning, dancing and measuring in order to rethink our relation to time and of being with chosen ancestors differently than our daily, habitual ways of doing so. Within this research I propose positioning my familial archive alongside my research around time. Here are some of the practices that I shared during my session. It is important to mention that as the session took place through zoom I imagined how the screen becomes our shared encounter or studio. I questioned in what ways we might use this 2D medium to feel and experience some sort of poetic togetherness. EXERCISES / PRACTICES / OPEN SOURCE - * word bankWe wrote random words into a shared google doc file. Later in the session we returned to those words and together, created a poem using only the words from the word bank. We read the poems out loud, all together. You can listen to us reading the poem together here- * Bits of heart across time — SUB(JECTIVE) kit / score For this exercise, I set an alarm for 1 minute and asked the participants to place their fingers on their wrist or heart and count their herbeats. When the minute was up they each wrote down their pulses. They repeated the same procedure at the end of the session. Here is an example of my pulses per minute:103 pulse (beginning of the session)77 pulse (end of the session)This practice was a way to position myself in time in a numeric way, one that he doesn't have a full control over. The following graph shows my pulses throughout 2019, taken in various places across the globe. Visit the link below for more information. Here is a link explaining further about that.https://longingtosuspend.cargo.site/bits-of-heart*following that I proposed-choose one of the following questions and write an answer to that questioncan you be timefull? where is your time? can you get rid of time? can you gain time? does your time exist in a certain place? does your time increase or decrease? is now just like any other time? is your time mostly on your legs or on the palms of your hands? is your time flying or is it landing? is your time a lie or is it true? is your time a poem or a story? It is a journey through the dance how abstract is your time? can you switch times? is your time within your body or outside of your body? can you let go of all times?can you become another time for sometime? for how long? can you break time apart? can you stretch time? does time dissolve you? can time assemble you? can you assemble time? do you feel that you have less time now or more time? is your time within your body or outside of your body? where is your time? *Hi time, here I invited the participants to write a couple letters, poems to time, where you directly address time as a living entity, starting with the phrase ‘Hi time’to read some of my letters to time, click here. If you would like to have a printed zine of the letters, feel free to contact me!also, antoine mermet composed some songs to the poems, if you want to listen to an expample or two- here you go : ) *in the last part of the session-practice we were drawing maps of utopic time and devoted a dance to one of our ancestor whom we never met. getting closer to abstract themes felt meaningful, like something I would like to practice and share more often, thanks time, hope to see you sonner than later xx <img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/x3lrVBuxOxWzbWGD8R___hc9C5ufy1jZ0zQhCc_KLmOrpwVJeHd9GBND13WiGJJ0yP5jnyA2yIY2EcNTeuhQRanF5xlkRIBgAY_ZHfPqj8pqa7KEhekxQZOpCke2LL36yUXn6Asz" width="624" height="395" style="width: 269.152px; height: 170.377px;" data-scale="100"> <img width="1354" height="886" width_o="1354" height_o="886" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e029c28244e150cbf52e3d621d9ecae9dc841743ce28e62eb4da3e929c79c612/Screen-Shot-2021-12-02-at-2.27.15-PM.png" data-mid="126293419" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e029c28244e150cbf52e3d621d9ecae9dc841743ce28e62eb4da3e929c79c612/Screen-Shot-2021-12-02-at-2.27.15-PM.png" /> <img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/CChhP5kEUgFf2PAC-Sl3gmeMSXHkeGsQAP7ib2piRIYGsuzsAXfc2ZH0Wx8ETjI54eEaDdF6EfmaP0yD3Snk3D6xSpwswAAbSNO9CLNg_i4qWtYlmHxqheAE7hNreAy9YPHVSGFl" width="407" height="467" style="width: 269.152px; height: 308.831px;" data-scale="100"> <img width="256.0000000000001" height="207.99999999999994" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/eNBvufU4RvukXmPxxMYfFSvwd4yRRGqR6Fg9X3468QPRDCbK7eMrvJw0Q1NsExqKAVjivXDayWl2-YGfeEp6VOzr96VoW7U57jHvtlO9IYkKFsrf1EYolT95LMnlReQthTAM5QLN" data-meta="{&quot;montessori&quot;:{&quot;width&quot;:18.8864553314121,&quot;x&quot;:25.52622478386167,&quot;y&quot;:-13.05821325648415,&quot;z&quot;:1}}" style="width: 256px; height: 207px;" data-scale="100"> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Nitsan Margaliot is a choreographer, dancer, and curator entangled with family and queer archives, fabulation, and vulnerable encounters. He danced with the Batsheva Ensemble and Vertigo Dance Company. Since moving to Berlin in 2014, he has worked with Laurent Chetouane, Maud Le Pladec, Kat Valastur, Aoife McAtamney, Moritz Majce, Benjamin Bertrand, Anne Collod, Milla Koistinen and Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop.His choreographic works have been presented at 14StreetY NYC, Vitlycke Centre for Performing Arts Sweden, Israel Festival, Radialsystem, English Theatre Berlin, Soundance Festival - Dock11, PATHOS Munich, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Adama Festival, LAB Frankfurt, Suzanne Dellal Centre, SomoS Arts Berlin, Barnes Crossing Cologne, Kelim Choreography Center, and Jewish Filmdays Frankfurt. Nitsan holds an MFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where he evolved his research around subjective relation to time through writings and installations. In 2020 he initiated TouchingMargins.com, an alter-archive, with Sasha Portyannikova; and The Platform, an organization creating sustainable conditions for freelance dancers in Israel, with Tamar Sonn. In 2022 he was co-curator of the exhibition and performance series Movement Research ACROSS at Galerie Wedding. He is a 2023 research resident at tanzhaus nrw and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm; and a recipient of the Tanzpraxis stipend granted by the Berlin Senate Department of Culture. https://touchingmargins.com/Kasia Wed, 01 Dec 2021 17:03:53 +0000 touchingmargins https://touchingmargins.com/Kasia Kasia Wolinska Artistic Profile Research “PostCommunistFutures- Guided Meditation”<img width="8667" height="5656" width_o="8667" height_o="5656" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/75058b0a11e054f44d293fe6354762b55d4484af1e76f1ae631190ea0fbc2099/Postcommunist-futures-guided-meditation.jpg" data-mid="126209138" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/75058b0a11e054f44d293fe6354762b55d4484af1e76f1ae631190ea0fbc2099/Postcommunist-futures-guided-meditation.jpg" />In order to experince the map click on this link Solo with cups/ ABT 1983/ Don Kichote Fav song Kasia Wolińska is a dancer, choreographer and writer based in Berlin. She practices dance as an artistic, social and political activity while exploring its complex histories and future potentialities. In 2018, together with Frida Sandström, she founded The Future Body At Work - a theory-practice duet. Since 2019 she serves as a board member of ZTB e.V. - an organisation working for the sake of improvement of life and work in the free scene of dance in Berlin. www.danceisaweapon.com https://touchingmargins.com/Boglarka Tue, 16 Feb 2021 22:23:15 +0000 touchingmargins https://touchingmargins.com/Boglarka From archives into living rooms Interview with&nbsp;Boglárka Börcsök Edited by Nicole Bradbury <img width="1364" height="768" width_o="1364" height_o="768" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1d6b1b6dd2f6f302b9132644aded69fc5186519a28307621dd102451e63d7ec0/04-Boglarka-IREN-Preisich-lesson.jpg" data-mid="99471571" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1d6b1b6dd2f6f302b9132644aded69fc5186519a28307621dd102451e63d7ec0/04-Boglarka-IREN-Preisich-lesson.jpg" /> #dance #film #hungary #art #movement #archive #ladies #relation #urgency #discontinuity #practice #political #context #valeska #gert #notion #future #communism #propaganda #fugitive #body #ghost Sasha &amp; NitsanWe both saw your movie ‘The Art of Movement’ and were deeply touched and moved by the devotion, stories, and the appreciation of knowledge that was shared and passed. How did you come across this topic and when? How do you keep on developing this heritage work currently leading to your latest performance work 'Figuring Age'? BoglárkaThis research project started with the residency program called “Research into the Unknown” in 2014. It was the first time that I came to do something in Budapest, because I left Hungary when I was 18 to study dance in Austria and Belgium. For years I was working abroad and I felt a strong urge to address my lack of knowledge about Hungarian dance history. This was probably in response to the education I've had in Belgium, which focused mostly on American, French and German references and offered no information about the Eastern Europe dance context. So I started my research project by visiting several archives in Budapest to discover women artists and female dancers from the beginning of the 20th century. I also refer to 2014, because I started working with Eszter Salamon in that year. While collaborating with her for many years, we've engaged in a strong dialogue that definitely nurtured my artistic processes.I want to jump shortly to your second question about “heritage”. Because, from the very beginning, I was searching for a critical angle on this term.&nbsp; Heritage itself for me already pre-signifies a certain notion of value, something that's canonized. Since I was dealing with my gap of historical knowledge, my interest was tending more towards hidden figures, marginal narratives that are usually excluded from or simply not written into this kind of canonized heritage realm. So for me heritage itself already signified the notion of continuity or something that we continue to value. I was more interested in discontinuities, and when it comes to Hungary, there were a lot of those. So I shifted my focus from heritage to the idea of inheriting, which for me had a lot more to do with generational transmissions, narratives which can emerge from our own family context. Things you don't know about, because it's kept in silence. Instead of hegemonic knowledge, I was drifting towards personal histories and how to tell something from there.This is probably the reason why I was excited to meet seven or eight dancers who were by then between 80 and 107 years old in Budapest. Each of them were part of the early development of modern dance, which is called in Hungarian: Art of Movement. For a year, whenever I traveled back to Hungary, I tried to visit one of them. I moved my research from archives into living rooms. The project developed from these personal encounters with the elderly women. In the context of European dance history Hungarian figures are extremely peripheral. The three Ladies I chose for the film are not only marginal because of their age, but also due to their life trajectories and ruptures in their personal and professional lives, which was effected by two World Wars, the Holocaust and the banning of the art of movement in the 1950’s.&nbsp; Instead of historical truth or objective history, I was interested to retrace some of the undercurrent cultural political movements that possibly create or don’t create heritage, where things can get lost. I understood that a lack of knowledge can also be a product of history. What I was searching for in archives, was already present in the bodies of these elderly dancers and in their memory. When it comes to dance archives, you mostly encounter figures who are already assigned to a certain historical period. When I met these old Ladies, their personal dance archives were still mostly in their drawers and it was quite nice to see that. But when you watch their black and white photos, suddenly they again become historical beings, and my interest was not to reduce them to ‘figures of a certain time’. They are bodies of knowledge, archives that happen to age, they transform. Their embodiment of a century was something that just blew me away, and I really thought a lot about how to transmit this scale of time with their bodies. When we filmed them dancing in front of the camera, we felt that it was their last moment of performing, which is something rare to witness. It was a celebration of their expressive yet opaque movements that could be deciphered and say, this might be more like modern dance, but for me it was less interesting to verify something, but rather to say that their physical expression can have a relevance as it is. They were still very much alive then. What emerged out of these first meetings was the urgency to find a format in which we can continue to work together. Sasha For me, it was very interesting to see through the movie how the women describe their approach and practice. I see those practices as super useful and interesting for the current moment. All educational programs are studying the same techniques currently, and the movement that these women are talking about and doing is from 100 years ago, but it's so fresh in comparison to what we are studying currently. &nbsp; Boglárka The Art of Movement emerged out of multiple practices. It was a heterogeneous movement, which was partly dance, but also gymnastics and a life-reform movement. It contributed to a new social paradigm for women. The pioneers of the Art of Movement were mostly women, who went to study abroad and later established their own schools in Hungary. Based on international influences, these practices were very different from each other, and each of the three women chosen for the film came from a different school. Éva E Kovács studied for example in the school of Valéria Dienes, who was actually the first woman ever to get a university diploma in Hungary. Based on her experiences in Raymond Duncan's colony in France she established her own school and philosophy of dance in Budapest.&nbsp;Isadora Duncan herself came to perform in&nbsp;Budapest amongst several famous figures like Harald Kreutzberg, Niddy Impekoven, Rosalia Chladek, Maud Allan. Valeska Gert came to perform as well. I've actually discovered Valeska for the first time in the Hungarian press reviews. Irén Preisich - the other protagonist of the film - who was already 101 at time of filming, studied from two young women, who are almost untraceable in the archives today. They established their school when they were only 20 - 22 years old! Imagine. Their methodology was critiqued a lot, because they were mostly improvising to music or dancing in silence. There was a lot of rivalry between the schools. Ágnes Roboz, for example, studied from Olga Szentpál, who enrolled at the Dalcroze school in Germany. So when it comes to transmission of knowledge, these women carry very different aesthetic paradigms, and principles of movement.NitsanFrom the movie we can see beautifully how oral transmission, as well as a passage between generations, is taking place, can you elaborate on your experience of working with those ladies? Does it seem relevant for you to keep the scores and suppose those as a practice through contemporary dance research? <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/236594c3ab49e74e12f9718439a832569d6487279d9391b84d1e84e491925e2d/01-Eva-E.-Kovacs.jpg" data-mid="99472178" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/236594c3ab49e74e12f9718439a832569d6487279d9391b84d1e84e491925e2d/01-Eva-E.-Kovacs.jpg" /> Boglárka While preparing for the filming process, I was thinking a lot about how to use my body as a tool, also as an archival tool. I realized that by offering myself as a dancer or more precisely a dance student, the elderly women opened up and were motivated to correct me, to show me how to do it better. It became a method to activate their memory and initiate a physical exchange. You’ve mentioned the word oral transmission, but there is also bodily transmission which is the basis of all dance education and when you study dance you have a mimetic relationship to your teacher, you imitate. It was exciting to actually work with such old bodies, who also need to take a rest and sleep and who are not always consistent. It was amazing to see how much their physical posture changed when they entered their teaching body. That was a strong transformation. Sasha &amp; Nitsan You’ve mentioned earlier Valeska Gert. We both saw you with Eszter Salamon performing together in the Valeska Gert works. Do you consider archival work as a lifelong long project for you? What moves you most when confronting characters and narratives from the archive?Boglárka Valeska Gert never became a teacher unlike most of the people who were part of the modern dance movement. For me she was a real artist who continues to have a strong impact on my work. I have to admit that her radical and fearless approach to voice, movement, and expression feels much closer to me then the modern dance from the ‘30's and ‘40's. When we started working with Eszter on the Valeska Gert projects, first we created the voice-installation ‘Love Letters to Valeska Gert’. Just to say that I'm still in love with her. Valeska Gert didn’t like abstract dance and she critiqued her modern dance contemporaries. It was interesting to work on Valeska Gert in&nbsp;parallel to the elderly dancers and the art of movement. The frame was quite different in both projects. With elderly dancers, my interest was in revealing the gaps between our practices rather than assume a smooth continuity. The dance classes in the film may give an idea that we are not speaking the same physical language. There is a dialogue. I try to be precise, but I also don't always understand the codes, which undermines the old idea that modern dance is universal. Perhaps what it reveals most is a generational gap of more than 70 years. That's a big gap to bridge. Nitsan I think that there is something very strong in this kind of hacking. I think about the West and the recognition, which came from some later generations that going back to the East might be hard. I'm thinking of the complex picture regarding definitions, and the fact that an aging body would never be a trend. Maybe you can speak a little bit about this genre that you're choosing, or this medium, and what it means for you, because you're basically a dancer voicing dancers? Boglárka Eszter Salamon always points out how modern dance was mute at the time when Valeska Gert already experimented with her voice. Eszter also has a strong practice of working on female autobiographies, and I think we connected through these interests. Giving voice to others is a political practice. By dealing with the aged dancing body there is an apparent body - politic both in the film and in the performance. However, through the personal stories and memories of the elderly dancers we can move through their different time periods that unravel their relationship between cultural and political contexts, and how it shaped the developments of dance. For me, the film was a way to study what movement can be.But also a way to relate to the actual political context in Hungary. When we entered the private spaces of these women and to ask them about their history, we needed to be sensitive. I think the fact that the filming crew came from outside of Hungary created a space of openness. Moreover,&nbsp; Irén, Éva and Ágnes have a history of reasons for paranoia, because all of them came from Jewish families.Irén, Éva and Ágnes have a history of reasons for paranoia, because all of them came from Jewish families. They all survived the Holocaust by hiding in Budapest, which I think is also very particular, because if you came from the countryside, you had little chance to survive. There were times when they were not allowed to go on stage like in Germany for example and shortly after the Second World War the Art of Movement was banned by the communist regime. So these women had to stop or adapt their practices throughout their lives. So making this film against the backdrop of the political context in Hungary, it really helped us to have other perspectives on history, otherwise it’s easy to lapse into reactionary positions. This project for me was also a way to deal with and try to understand the roots of the rising nationalism in post-socialist countries. It was necessary to retrace how the different political ideologies and movements were embodied physically. In terms of archives, there is archive footage in the film.&nbsp; These materials don't come from dance archives. All this footage comes from a newsreel archive - and these materials were shown in cinemas before movies started (except for the first video - which is a private recording of Irén from 1934 - filmed by her brother). So we were interested in the dance which was already embedded in political and cultural events of the time as they appeared in the news. These footage are from the ‘30's to ‘50's paralleling the stories that are told by the elderly dancers. We were searching for the Art of Movement in this archive, however there weren’t many materials. So this is where my mentioning of ideology comes in. Archival footage is often treated in documentaries as factual or truthful, a form of historical proof. On the other hand, none of these clips are objective or neutral, as they represent very strongly the hegemonic ideas of the body, culture and aesthetics. Seeing them in a timeline as they are intersecting with the women's stories, their construction gets revealed. The footage are counterpoints that give the image of dance that was officially communicated to the larger society, dance which was approved or even used as propaganda. <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7fa235341c1695d863d692a175f8867abde01727d4491a5d0cfdb18864fafb07/AGNES.jpg" data-mid="99493737" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7fa235341c1695d863d692a175f8867abde01727d4491a5d0cfdb18864fafb07/AGNES.jpg" /> Sasha How was it for you to dedicate the performance to the elderly &nbsp;dancers rather than reconstructing a dance piece that they were doing? Do you feel the elderly bodies that you embody inside of you, because you became them&nbsp;so precisely? Are they present? Does this practice that you learned from them stay with you like a vocabulary, or your artistic approach, your toolkit? Boglárka In ‘Figuring Age’ I continue the dialogue with the elderly women through embodying them. At the same time, I don’t make myself look old by putting on wrinkles in order to erase my age. The challenge here was to enable multiple bodies to exist at the same time. The audience has to negotiate with seeing me young, while encountering the three old women. It's a fugitive body, it's a body that escapes representation. The performance is a lot about creating a space that lets these elderly women reappear, but also gives space to another sense of time. It's about being together in a fiction, but in a fiction which is shared. I’m addressing the spectators all the time, there is also touch, physical weight. The work invites other temporalities to emerge through the stories and memories. But you could say that a certain notion of future exists there too. The process of making this performance needed this whole research process of making the film beforehand. Nitsan It's really like the practice of becoming. I want to speak about the fact that you keep calling your work research, which is positioning it into some particular value place, because it seems to have different and multiple outcomes, and it's taking place across multiple years. I could even say the film is documentary, but also, the performance that we saw live is what I would consider a documentary as well and this created a way of working through relationality. Boglárka I get what you mean about the performance being a documentary, but I like to see it more as fiction. The film became a documentary because of circumstances and urgency to film these women then, as there might not be a possibility to continue working together. I was collaborating with Andreas Bolm in both the film and the performance, whom you met during the performance. We started working together very closely during the editing of the film, but he was also there during the filming process. Andreas is a filmmaker, but it made total sense to continue working together on the performance. Our question was how to keep going beyond the filmed footage? Or rather, how not to stop there where the filmed materials end? That's where the discourse of the ghosts starts, and where the ghosts can emerge between the mediums of film and performance. I’m not talking now about a literal idea of the ghost, but a ghost more in a Derridean sense. How things can come back, or return, which one can also see in relationship to history or to political contexts. Nitsan You are turning away from us in the beginning of the performance and you're really turning us towards ghosts. We see this transformation, which is so precious, and the whole idea that there is an urgency in the fact that you made this project. I'm also relating to the idea of the impossibility of returning or not returning to my own relation to Germany, as someone who had roots here before the Holocaust and coming back otherwise, it’s an impossibility. <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f49168e8794277238c31c09238d8db0c2b54d1c769b5414136762ee6c259caf9/performance.jpg" data-mid="99494789" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f49168e8794277238c31c09238d8db0c2b54d1c769b5414136762ee6c259caf9/performance.jpg" /> Boglárka So in the lockdown we started filming the performance and while working on the introduction speech, Andreas came up with this turn away from the camera which comes from the film director Werner Herzog, well actually from the actor Klaus Kinski.We were trying to figure out how to film the performance and really wrestling on how to find a way to let the viewer enter into the process of transformation and to make the fiction we are creating possible for the camera. It was not easy to film this performance live, we’ve tried, but because it's a very intimate work, you don’t want to put the camera in the face of the other people. SashaBy the way, did it happen through the pandemic that the interest in film moved into the center of your work or was it so either way regardless of the pandemic… BoglárkaAs I said, there was always an urgency to film. With the elderly dancers it was due to the fact that they were dying, and the urgency to film the performance now was due to the fact that it's COVID, and I don't know if it’s going to happen again in the future. So we had to find a way to archive this performance. I’m interested in the movement between different mediums, a movement that also challenges methodologies for making a performance work. If I continue to do film it’s because I want to continue collaborating with Andreas. We are actually preparing a new research project based on 16.000 portraits photographs from the local archive of my hometown in Hungary. <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f6aae1cd009bc711a9c8a0b04c0344ff2fe0a9d7495d2ba9997ee799168cbbda/performan.jpg" data-mid="99495753" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f6aae1cd009bc711a9c8a0b04c0344ff2fe0a9d7495d2ba9997ee799168cbbda/performan.jpg" /> * film stills by Andreas Bolm and Lisa Rave. https://touchingmargins.com/Christelle Tue, 16 Feb 2021 01:51:02 +0000 touchingmargins https://touchingmargins.com/Christelle Circulating Inside - Reducing the Distance to Folkloric Dance Interview with Christelle Kamanan Edited by Nicole Bradbury#dance #cuban #people #folkloric #culture #ivorycoast #africa #teachers #westafrica #africanroots #occidental #transatlantictrade #colonisation #spirituality #oralhistory <img width="3632" height="5456" width_o="3632" height_o="5456" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dda187f4805562586ee9ffa9ff0ac3edc76cec60e13e1cb07a83f319ba053ef2/_DSC1694.jpg" data-mid="99403733" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dda187f4805562586ee9ffa9ff0ac3edc76cec60e13e1cb07a83f319ba053ef2/_DSC1694.jpg" /> Nitsan You're the only artist in the series at the moment that relates to folklore dance, in particular, Cuban folklore. And if I understand, you're not Cuban. So you also look at it with some distance. I'm curious about the experience of embodying this dance. What critical perspective do you have towards or in relation to it? &nbsp;Christelle Yes, indeed, I'm not Cuban. At the beginning, I first approached it as a total foreigner. I started by approaching Cuban music. I'm native to West Africa, Ivory Coast, and over there it is really normal just to listen to Cuban music, especially in the ‘60s and ‘70s. This is the time when my parents grew up. So my parents grew up listening to Cuban artists, and therefore, as a kid, I was listening to what my parents were listening to, so in my child's mind, I wasn't making any difference between African music, Ivorian music, and Cuban music. For me, it was somehow the same. As a child, you don't really understand this kind of difference. So I grew up with a very close approach to Cuban culture, and Cuban history, and Cuban music. As a teenager, when I started to learn the history of the country, and learn how Cuban people are related to Africa, particularly to West Africa, I found myself to be more interested in the country. I learned Spanish since my idea was to go to Cuba. Then when I arrived in Berlin, I found out that there is a huge Cuban community, at least in comparison to where I was living in France, or West Germany. I was fascinated about how they have been able to maintain a strong connection to Africa, through the culture, especially through music, and it is what I wanted to investigate. And then I discovered that it's not only in the music, it's also in the dance, and somewhat in the food. Then as a dancer, I slightly switched from my previous practice to learning a bit more of their folklore. I've discovered that actually, it's not that foreign for me, because they also have a lot of West African movement, especially those coming from Yoruba culture, which is a culture that you find more in Nigeria or Benin, as well as movement that is also in traditional dances that we have in Ivory Coast. Instead of learning it at school, or by reading some books, and so on, I discovered it throughout my body. When I was doing those kinds of body moves, I could just feel that it was not a foreign movement –it was a body movement that I already knew, or it looked like something that I'd already done. So more and more this distance has been reduced for me. And I don't see it as a total foreigner, but more as if it's a part of my culture, which has evolved on another territory, and which has been changed by other people. It's interesting to see how it has evolved for me. ... in my child's mind, I wasn't making any difference between African music, Ivorian music, and Cuban music. … it's a part of my culture, which has evolved on another territory... Sasha You mentioned a connection between African folk dance in the region where you came from and the Cuban one. How does prejudice play a role in the function, stigma, as well as access to the archive? Christelle First of all, we have very few videos, or even books, or tutorials, or any kind of material that you could use to learn. Even access to classes, especially when you live outside of Africa, and even when you live in Africa... To learn traditional dance, it's difficult, you need to be able to go to the villages. In the main cities, you don't really have access to it. So it requires you to travel. And for people growing up or living outside of their native country, it's kind of impossible. It's very difficult to find traditional African dance classes. You can only find it when you have someone who had the idea to create a class, but then usually, it won't be specific. This person would name it African dance, or West African dance, – it's a mix of several dances because West Africa is a space of several countries and cultures. Even though I am still open to learning other dance styles, it may not be related to my culture. This is a huge prejudice, and it is also one of the reasons that has led me to keep on learning Cuban folklore dance. I was saying to myself, "Okay, I cannot learn traditional dance from Ivory Coast and my culture, but at least the Cuban one is really close to it and it’s a specific one.” So by learning it, I knew that I was still learning a part of my traditional folklore. And even for Cuban folklore, it is something not so common. Nowadays you find more contemporary popular dances like salsa, but for the very folkloric one, you need to have a teacher who can pass you the information. You need to be able to find it, and it's not easy. There is no curriculum that you can follow outside of Cuba, I mean in dance schools or clubs, or even if you think of books, it would be very difficult to learn dancing through the book. It's a cloudy area where you need to ask a lot of questions, to find the right people to direct you to the content. Then it's a learning and researching project because from what I know, there is no database or even a library where you could go and be sure that you will find this information. To learn traditional dance, it's difficult &lt;...&gt; In the main cities, you don't really have access to it &lt;...&gt; it's kind of impossible. It’s a kind of unspoken ritual. When you go there on holiday, you learn the trending dance. Another form of archive that is really popular to learn any type of African dance has been the VHS tape. Until the booming of the internet and platforms like YouTube, VHS tapes were the only easily accessible tools to visualize dance and music videos from any African country. Basically, people in your native country would save the music videos broadcasted on local TV and they would send the VHS tapes to you via someone traveling. We were doing the exact same with audio tapes to have the music. I still have a bag full of them! In my case, I have had the opportunity to go at least once a year to Ivory Coast as a child and I also lived there for 4 years as a teenager. Therefore, I learned a lot during these moments. It’s a kind of unspoken ritual. When you go there on holiday, you learn the trending dance. Sasha I remember that in our meeting in ADK (Think Tank meeting 2020), you mentioned that there are unspoken roots of this dance &lt;salsa&gt; that are now not obvious. So people just go to social dance events, they practice, but they have no idea about the history of these dances. Dancing was &lt;...&gt; a free space where they could &lt;...&gt; maintain their identities…... the repetitive movement that you do while you work on the field enslaved, creates also a flow of "planting, taking, planting, taking..." When you repeat this, during 30 minutes, a certain musicality and body movements flow appears. Christelle Even myself at the beginning, I wasn't seeing a clear connection between the Trans-Atlantic Trade, West African body movements, and Cuban folklore. Because most of the African descent Cubans were taken from West Africa, and these are the dances that they were practicing when they used to be in Africa. Then when they were enslaved and brought to the Americas (in this case, Cuba) they still had the memory of the music, sound, body movement, and so on. And they have been doing it through centuries, and this is the main reason why we have this strong connection. Dancing was for them a kind of a free space where they could express themselves and maintain their identities, as they were forced to make invisible who they used to be (changing names, not speaking your language). When you are enslaved, you don't have holidays or a day off, and so on. So what you could do, it's only what you have with you; you have your voice, and your body, and with your voice, you can sing, and with your body, you can dance. This is a kind of entertainment that you can do without having any other thing. And you can do it while you work. While you work in the field, you can still sing and you can still dance... while you're not going to dance like crazy as if you're in a club, of course, but you can dance by working actually. Imagine that, instead of just doing right-left, you can do right-right-left or left-left-right, and then you create a body movement and a musical flow just by doing this. And the repetitive movement that you do while you work on the field enslaved, creates also a flow of "planting, taking, planting, taking..." When you repeat this, during 30 minutes, a certain musicality and body movements flow appear. The movements born through this process have been added to the already existing dance vocabulary. And we still find all of this in popular dancing styles like salsa, mambo, or other Cuban-based dance. Actually, it is exactly the same way that Blues music, finding its roots in the Mali area - West Africa evolved in the South of the United States. In Colombia, we find this with Cumbia. The stepping is directly inspired by how enchained people could step. There are also movements related to their religious beliefs, or ways to see how the world works, the seasons, the storms, the wind, and the water, and so on. Embodying these elements is something we have absolutely been doing in Africa. We believe, we speak and we live with our body. The stepping is directly inspired by how enchained people could step. Nitsan It is amazing to get all this knowledge and context. It really enriches our thinking and also considering dance in those places that one maybe wouldn’t consider them all the time. Because you speak of, for instance, this labor experience as this kind of lived experience that informs the dance, or is the dance. How does your positionality or lived experience in other places, or mainly in Berlin, inform your artistic or your dance practice? Christelle For me here, in Berlin or even in Germany, it's another culture. It's a culture in which I didn't grow up. So there is another body language, which is still challenging to understand if I may say, especially the nuances. Well, I was born in France and raised between France and in Ivory Coast. On one hand I am familiar with Latin culture and, on the other hand with West African culture. Therefore, I am used to interacting with my body and reading other people’s body language in a very completely different way. Therefore, I often observe and question, or even sometimes restrict my body language. I am also navigating with these questions when I dance in Germany. How can I connect my natural body language within my dance practice, and how can it also speak to a local audience? How to match this? Then I have been experiencing that dance is still this place where I can freely express all my emotions and feelings without feeling awkward, or totally weird, or totally outside of the society. When I dance, I still have this place where I can express my emotions and feelings as if I'm in my own culture – whether in France or Ivory Coast. I can really move my hands... I can really have this free body language while I dance. It has encouraged me to even dance more when I'm here. I found the need to dance stronger, because I need to express it. Dancing in a different cultural context is a research with my own body. I don’t dance the same way or at least I feel I don’t dance the same way when I dance in other contexts. Sasha I agree, it really helps. I also moved here just two years ago, and I started to feel this demand much stronger than before. It was very interesting how you explained this contextuality, or Cuban dances, because I remember that during my education, we had a class of Afro dance. Of course, it was taught by a white person in St. Petersburg, but he described a lot of these connections: what movement means what, for instance, you drop the seed... but he never brought this context that these relations exist,because people were in slavery. Because if I now trace back to other folk dances, these dances are mostly for fests, for weddings, for other communal occasions, but it's never about how people are going to the field, and how they work there. And it never came to my mind, so I'm curious, when you go here in schools, or in other places, where people, for example, from my background, have no idea, do you feel teachers transmit this information enough? Or it's rather like what my teacher did. He just explained, but didn't bring context? ... dance is still this place where I can freely express all my emotions and feelings without feeling awkward, or totally weird, or totally outside of the society Christelle Before answering this, I just want to mention that it's very common in Africa, and in West Africa particularly, while you work on the field to chant and to dance. It's very natural as well, not only when you work in the field, whenever you work. For instance, when you wash clothes, there are specific songs for this, songs when you cook, songs for whatever work you can do, for fishermen and so on – it's really part of the culture as well. Then regarding the teaching, I cannot really answer this question. I have been really lucky and I'm still grateful to my teachers here in Germany, because they're totally aware and fully conscious of it, and they keep on transmitting this history. They really insist on it. Even one of my teachers, Lisandra Cervantes, the one for the folkloric dances, she's Cuban, she learned in Cuba, and she used to teach at the University in La Havanna as well, so she has this full knowledge, so it's part of her teaching. It's not something that she would separate from it. But yes, I'm not sure … people are not really informed about how the Trans-Atlantic Trade and then slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean has totally transformed and impacted some cultures... that everyone has this in mind. And also I wouldn't blame other teachers or party organizers. I can really understand that it's not so easy to relate to it, because it's a very foreign culture and country. This part of history is not really spread out in the mass media. So even outside of the dancing scene, people are not really informed about how the Trans-Atlantic Trade and then slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean has totally transformed some cultures, and how it has impacted cultures, and how some countries are still culturally really closed. So I totally understand that they cannot see this when they dance. I mean, if you don't see it in your daily life, why would you see it in your dance practice? Nitsan You're bridging amazingly between life and dance. They are so interconnected, and people tend to think that one is professional, and the other is not. But when they are alive, it really helps. You speak about how your teachers transmit what their teachers pass to them in an oral embodied history. I'm curious if you consider yourself as someone that would want to pass it on. And I'm also curious about the position of this dance on the stages in Berlin, if it interests you, and why it's not there? And also how this continent in the German narrative is kept in the margins, or it's kept in its place of safety for German audiences, and why is that? What does it mean in this very moment? Christelle If I consider myself passing it on, I would say, I don't know yet. I may be doing it without noticing it. There are some things that you do while you dance. You don't create an intellectual process, you're just in it. And maybe later I will look at it and I will say, "Oh, okay, this is what I've been doing the last years". About a place on the stage, at the beginning, it made me really sad, because I could see that it didn't have value as a dance style. So it was really painful and frustrating. And then I understood and looked at it in a different way. That it is not seen and not shown, because it is really unknown. Only a few people look at it without using Occidental lenses. And I think it's not only from the German side, but also from our side, the people directly involved in these cultures, to speak louder and dance louder, and go on stages where maybe we are not expected, informing people. I think it's a long-term process. But it's still very far out from the German culture and German history, but Germany also had colonies in Africa. So it's not totally outside of German history, actually. And I think this part of German history is very not known. It is one of the current social, cultural and political questions in Germany. It is asked to have these moments of the German History taught in schools and universities, for instance. A city like Berlin holds a strong symbol. The Berlin Conference – 15th November 1884 to 26th February 1885 – was the moment when European colonial powers traded their African territories, which led to the birth of new geographical areas in Africa. These are the countries that we still see on a map. So African people do remember such an event and that Germany had colonies in Africa. Then, the other side also needs to see that, I think. Only a few people look at it without using Occidental lenses.The Berlin Conference (1884-85) – is the moment when European colonial powers- trade their African territories &lt;...&gt; African people do remember such an event and that Germany had colonies in Africa. Sasha Not sure if this is related to our conversation, but in Russia where I came from, salsa and other dances that have African roots are very popular as a leisure practice. There is prejudice, not only toward African folk dances, but to folk dances in general, that there is conceptual, intellectual dance movement, and then there is folk heritage dance movement. And in order to bring them together, you as a choreographer need to create a particular frame. It's separated in a way, you cannot just do ballet on a stage of contemporary dance, and to the same extent, you cannot just do any folk dance on the contemporary dance stage either. Who creates those rules and why? How do you feel about that? And could you tell a little bit about your other dance background and how it relates to what you research now? Christelle Especially when you look at "African dance rooted", I feel that there is a bag, and whatever dance may have African roots, would be put in this bag. And it's as if they are all the same. And many times it can be looked at or even described as something exotic, and not seen as a dance practice which has rules. This is a very common thing. And then especially when it comes to African folkloric dance, because as we said before, there is a lack of access to the archive, it is of course not spread. So there is a kind of bubble that is supposed to gather all of the dance, and it is not really. Particularism is not seen. Mentioning my dance education I have mainly learned not in an academy or university, but mainly next to my curriculum studying. I started with modern jazz, then I&nbsp; went to hip hop. Then I've learned other African dancing styles, like Kizomba, or a dancing style that we also have typically in Ivory Coast, Zouglou, for instance, which is also linked to popular revendication movement. So it wasn't only a dance, it started as a protest movement among young people in the ‘90s. And from that they have created a music style, a dance style, and I would say a kind of lifestyle. So it is very specific from the country. If you notice, at the moment rap music was strongly used to protest in other parts of the world. We had the exact same movement with Zouglou in Ivory Coast, a movement speaking about local realities. On one hand, I have been influenced by hip hop from France or the USA, and, on the other hand, there was Zouglou from Ivory Coast. Not forgetting the Cuban music of my father in my ears!Since last year I have started learning the Acogny Technique, created by Germaine Acogny. She is a Senegalese and French dancer, teacher, and choreographer, considered as the mother of contemporary African dance. She has created her own dance technique mixing traditional African dance styles and Occidental dance styles. Due to COVID-19 I must learn online so far, but it’s still an amazing experience. Nitsan I think it's helpful to see that there are so many cultures within Africa, there are so many different dances. It's so specific and so local to each and every community, right? And then this idea of the archive... you said a couple times, there is no tutorial. And I wonder if there is even a desire, because I have a feeling that in relation to the idea of the transmission, there is something about permission. There is something about the value of the oral history, of the embodied history, that seems very important. And that refuses these other ways of trying to make it into a book, because it is so vast, and it is so detailed, and it's so much about person-to-person connection. How do you feel about an attempt to use other means that are used more in other dances? Christelle Yes, it's really true. Especially because I know that in Africa, when you want to access traditional knowledge or even history, if you want to ask questions to elders, there are a lot of protocols to follow. They will test you, they will ask questions to know who you are, what your intentions are. Why do you really want to know this? Why do you really want to learn it? What are you going to do with it next? This is really important for them to know, not only why you're learning, but what you're going to do with it. And because they know that what they're passing to you has value. This somehow prevents the idea of maybe being recorded and being totally freely available online, and so on. The other question is how much interest do you have in learning it? Is it a one-shot learning? Or are you going to commit to this process of learning? And coming again, maybe the next month, or the next year, two years, and so on? And are you going to incorporate it into your lifestyle? And all of these are questions that they also have in mind, and the reason why they do not pass it on so easily. Another thing is right after the decolonization, people had this idea in Africa that they had to be modern, and for them it meant being occidental people, adopting an occidental lifestyle. This has affected their cultural practices, and dance, of course. Even though they knew the movements, they didn't teach those movements to their children. For instance, my parents didn't teach us those body movements. We learned it from other people of the family, or other people of the community, because they didn't see it as something that was very important to be passed on. They had this idea that we had something more important to learn than this. It was also a way to protect us and provide us with the best tools to find our ways into this post-colonial world. I know it sounds paradoxical. Well, throughout their upbringing teachers have taught them not to speak their language or not to behave like they would do outside school. It was strictly forbidden, and it was a shame not to speak French, or not to behave like the dominant French colonial model. It is obvious that no parent would want their child to be shamed, blamed or punished. The other thing that I can mention is the relation to religious belief, because many traditional dances are connected to the religious beliefs and spiritual systems that have existed before the colonization. That was also cultural colonization and religious colonization, which is as deep or even more than economic&nbsp; colonization. When people changed their religious beliefs, it was impossible for them to maintain this dance practice. It was described as ‘evil body movements’. So this has also created a gap, because they wouldn't teach those dances anymore. Sasha My teacher who taught African dance practiced a lot of hip hop and other styles, and he had an idea that really fascinates me, that this tremendous embodiment in all dances that have African roots, is somehow keeping that religious system through at least the dance. He told a lot of stories, that this dance is for gods who care of&nbsp; … many traditional dances are connected to the religious beliefs that used to exist before colonization. … it was impossible to maintain this dance practice, described as ‘evil body movements’.&nbsp; farming, this dance is a war-god dance. When we learned, I felt that it gave me this expressivity, and it charged me emotionally. I'm still fascinated by this idea of how this embodiment traveled through generations, and I still can see an absolutely different quality and deepness. How movement goes deep... to the gods. Christelle Makes total sense for me. And I would say, it is really the case. When I started to dance I was young, and I wasn't aware that what I was feeling was so connected to spirituality. I just didn't know what it was, but I knew there was something. And when I started to dance more and more folkloric Cuban dancing, I started to receive more and more information: this movement is related to Yemaya, for instance (the Ocean Orisha) or Shango (lightning and thunder Orisha) I can really feel this kind of power or flow. I definitely understand why your teacher said that and I totally agree that it's also a way to pass your belief and not only religion, but really spirituality: the way you refer to what is around us. And many of those songs are related to spirituality. It can&nbsp;just be music for when people are just grateful for having the sun, and going to celebrate the sun, or going to celebrate the rain, and so on. And then everything they're going to do – to express this gratitude – dances will relate to it. Then yes, I definitely agree that you can feel it. When I started to dance I was young, and I wasn't aware that what I was feeling was so connected to spirituality. Sasha Thank you Nitsan We're getting closer to an ending, are there things that we didn't speak about that you would like to mention? Christelle For me, Cuban folkloric dance was a way to get closer to my culture, to my African roots. And through this, it also helped me to have the courage to go and look deeper at my culture and my folkloric dance, and directly learn West African folkloric dance, especially those from Ivory Coast. The distance has been reduced – it's something circulating inside me.links: Music showing the connection between Africa and Cuba: Afrocubism album&nbsp; Las Maravillas de Mali&nbsp; Africando&nbsp; Franco &amp; TP OK Jazz&nbsp; Les Bantous de la Capitale&nbsp; To learn Afro-Cuban folklore in Berlin Yerba Buena Art Company Lisandra Cervantes Fernández at Global Music School *photo by Hannah Beyrich