Vibrant Matter

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As within so without. Each system of the body has its own quality and is equally important to the healthy functioning of the greater whole. The internal relationships of the body offer a beautiful model in microcosm of the relationships between individuals, within and between society and the world. With this approach I engage in social and environmental justice as an embodied practice, integrating all the multiple parts of ourselves, in an interplay of the body in and of the world. This was already partly the subject in one of my earliest choreographies “Back to the roots with Jimmy” (2007), integrating the various qualities and energy centres within oneself in relation to one’s family.

I am interested in relationality, a political ecology of things and an intersectional approach to transformative justice and liberation. Considering our bodies to be made up of human and non-human material challenges our perception of a divide between human and nature and puts us on the same playing field with each other and with non-human entities, thus away from an anthropocentric hierarchical position to an engagement based on mutual relationship and cooperation. It has been the intention of my work to help this sensitization to the interconnection of all, such as through affect and aesthetics. In the choreography “soul-scapes” (2017) we question the colonial, extractive and greedy human behaviours, in this case of space mining and space colonization, and through a rite of passage which includes tending to the grief of the pain caused thereof, as well as that of looking inside and the abandoning of a dream that is not sustainable, we transition towards a more mature world of “we” instead of “me”, and of responsible stewardship. In times of isolation and regressive nationalistic closing of borders, the project “Brave (K)new W/Rave” looks at what are our shared values. Through the notions of pleasure, jouissance, collectivity and regeneration we verbally and physically rave the problems we are facing and the worlds we do want to shape. I shared this project in the event “Towards Regenerative Cultures” (2020), created with our collective Exit Map at The Green, Nunhead Community Centre, where we held a workshop and engaged in conversations with the local community around the subject. 

Inspired by critical, feminist, queer and post-colonial theory, as well as by vital materiality and liberated psychologies, I am committed to “liberation” as a holistic term that urges us to consider the links between economic, political, sociocultural, spiritual and psychological transformation. As the strands of individual, community and ecological wellbeing are interdependent, I look at how much of our most intimate psychological suffering is connected with the historical contexts in which we live and the ways we have learned to think about them, such as hierarchical and dissociative ways of thinking, current neo-colonialism and exploitative forms of transnational capitalism and twenty-first-century globalization.

By working with the body and the voice as vibrant matter constantly becoming in poiesis, I am interested in performing the absurdity of the separating and “othering” mechanisms created in our thinking which permitted the extent of racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist and environmental violence, as well as the idea of normal. I am thus on one hand interested in turning toward the psychological wounds and collective trauma—the symptoms and signs of suffering—caused by these social arrangements, such as fragmentation, survival of the fittest or the impact of individualism. How the body remembers what consciousness has forgotten or what has been repressed, like a social amnesia. I am here interested in what Tada Hozumi coins cultural somatics. On the other hand, I look at how we can articulate and celebrate difference and multiplicity, grounded in love and belonging. As transnational migration is affecting enormous numbers of people, many of us carry multiple maps and discourses, and need to negotiate complex identities that are both emergent and hybrid. I am looking at fluid and nomadic identity as a possibility for re-imagining selfhood in two ways: first to step aside from styles of selfhood that contribute to polarization and oppression, and second, to explore the possible function of identity as a plurality of sites for connecting with oneself and others. In my choreographic work and practice I intend to create liminal spaces for the reclaiming of psychic multiplicity and complex identity as pathways to interconnectedness.

I collaborate with other artists and with people from different fields, devising work through participatory methods. It is my desire to work in ways that are accessible and inclusive, and to reach beyond a dance audience, such as through immersive, participatory or environmental theatre, as well as by inviting people into the project, research, reflections and questions through workshops, conversations and writing. By extending that connection to online platforms or videos to cross distances and reach a wider community, as well as tending to and sharing the process as much as the product, my choreographic work aims to contribute to a sustainable and on-going practice and dialogue.

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