Moving Margins Symposium
dance archives in practice through distance and absence
What is missing in the known and familiar lineage of dance history?
How do we meet and engage needed alter-narratives?
What methodologies and practices may we develop to reconsider the archive in its diversity?
With a focus on figures and tendencies outside of the North American and Western European canon, we establish a more relevant, complete, controversial, and uncomfortable picture of dance history.
To do so, a group of dance artists from diverse backgrounds has been meeting regularly throughout 2021. They are:
- Nitsan Margaliot (explores poetic ways of creating homages to ancestors while experimenting with subjective paths of addressing and inventing time anew)
- Christelle Ahia Kamanan (exploring the transmission and perpetuation of cultural heritage in the absence of material archives - case study of the Transatlantic African cultural heritage)
- Kasia Wolińska (dance and horizons /+ shadows of postcommunism, resonances of the Cold War in the production and practice of dance, recovering of the forgotten cultural, social and political legacies of the East)
- Amelia Uzategui Bonilla (remembers and recreates improvisational dance scores, sourcing Afro-Peruvian literature, research, and living dance practitioners)
- Sasha Portyannikova (recycles the textual traces of dance experiments in earlier Soviet Russia and its influence on the post-Soviet embodiment)
- Bianca Figl (researching into material and embodied archives, different forms of knowledge traditions, ways to decolonize archives in an ethnographic museum, practitioner of different dance styles from Indonesia)
- Agata Siniarska (explores how choreography can be an archiving tool, between somatic and environmental landscapes, between human and non-human bodies, in the time of mass extinction)
By creating, inventing, and discussing the possibility of revisiting archives from the margins with contemporary dance tools, the group was questioning the existing paradigm of uni-directional knowledge transfer from experts to students. Through the half-year-long
web-based laboratory, an educational structure was tested in which all participants were exchanging on a horizontal level, bringing their own expertise, sharing practices with each other, and making blind spots of existing infrastructure in dance archives visible.
In this symposium, the individual research projects of the participants, as well as outcomes of this nourishing exchange, will be shared.
Date
Sunday, 19th of December 11-19h
Format
Online - free admission
Ways of attendance
- Watch the live stream: The introduction, presentation of research projects, and panel discussion of the symposium, which will be broadcast via touchingmargins.com
- Join the zoom meeting: participate in additional (non broadcasted) group practices,directly get in touch with the speakers, ask questions, and share your concerns. The amount of attendees is limited. For pre-registration, please write an email with your full name to annachwial@gmail.com
The schedule in detail will be published soon on the touchingmargins.com website.
In collaboration with DEUTSCHES ZENTRUM DES INTERNATIONALEN THEATERINSTITUTS (ITI), Mediathek für Tanz und Theater
Supported by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK - STEPPING OUT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance.