PROGRAMME
SERVICE
Applications are already closed.
This field project explores the ocean as a realm of ancestral knowledge. This amphibious artistic project includes dance practice both in the water and in the studio.
By applying the bodily structures and movements of oceanic animal ancestors and water entities, understood as pedagogies, the participants transform into ancient-future organisms, composted and multiple through touch, dance, and song.
The practice-based bodily and discursive research illuminates two key facets: the embodiment of mestizo (of mixed origins such as in creole), First Nations, and Afro-diasporic ontologies of water, which have persisted in Abya Yala (indigenous name for the American continent), encoded in dance and song, beyond colonisation, the slave trade, and capitalist extraction.
Secondly, the research explores oceanic movements on a broader scale, encompassing ancient animal species – such as sponges, cnidarians (corals and medusa), mollusks, and echinoderms – understood as pedagogies to be applied to our bodies through the virtual and the imaginal.
Actualising an ancestral future in which water is no longer understood as a substance, H2O, or a natural resource, but as a sacred source of all life, this research explores the ocean as a nexus of origins, transformation, and extinction, yet also as a vibrant realm crucial for the sustenance of life on Earth.
Research projects require an application.
*This field project is aimed at artists (dancers, choreographers, and arts practitioners) who can swim and are interested in exploring the intersections between dance, artistic research, and the visual arts while being (in) water. This field project also proposes forms of healing that do not presuppose disease. So, artists interested in the transformative powers of touch are welcome to apply.
