July 2021: along with Janaína and two other PhD colleagues I am invited to co-teach the course:
Dance History and Contexts, in an intensive six-weeks period to the first year Bachelor’s students of Dance Studies.
To me it seemed to be a unique occasion to practice teaching with, and developing a communicable language that is co-crafted and co-curated as our dance histories and contexts.
As a displaced subject of dance and academia, I assumed the reason why I am invited to teach such an important course, was the interest from the course owner(s)-coordinator(s) to the minor literature (as a Deleuzian term) and alter-history of dance; specifically when one of the major contexts in the course was the political.
On such a unique occasion of our close-ness (in the mode of collaborative teaching) we all were so excited about the potential hybrid language that could have emerged as a container to hold and transmit historical narratives of dance(s) of ourselves and others’.
We were also given the course outline not only being trusted to deliver the high quality knowledge but also given the extension of freedom to do whatever we think we need to do with them.
The ambiguity in the extension of boundaries of the free move around the prescribed course outline caused co(n)fusion. How to attend the given knowledge? Where is the beginning/heading …where is the end?
where/when is each of our locations in/through such a single story of dance? What are the risks of a single story? What does this singularity afford? What are its promises?
What are the risks of deviating from such a singularity? What if re-arranging it differently/other-wise?
Who counts as self and who is the other in this single story of Dance?
Who are the main characters?
The Makers of Modern Dance in Germany : Rudolph Laban, Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss.
Isadora Duncan–based/Martha Graham/Josephine Baker-based choreographic tasks.
Explore the philosophies and practices of Post-Modern choreographers including Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Merce Cunningham
What are the consequences of losing heads? What are the risks of moving ex-centricaly around the History? Outside the central Euro-american locations in time and place.
What is our sense of presence (in time and place) as dance teachers, when the major and minor locations collide?
… bruises emerge and express themselves through accusation for appropriating improperly, the ground that I (we) didn’t have the right for appropriation.
What does this outline represent?
Whose property is this?
Arriving at the outline through our different time (and geo-political) differences lead to emergence of different subject-positions in this teaching situation.
At home, or displaced
What time is it?
In the Central EuropeanTime, I am situated in the middle-east, speaking the non-English language of knowledge and a migrant (tenant) in the disciplinary field of Dance, History and Contexts …
Disqualified for being late, behind and if the Worlds order begins from no. 1, my world (of dance) is numbered as 3. The third world.
Arriving as the third, means waiting for my turn to arrive….
Waiting …
… In between the east and the west.
.
In the beginning of autumn, (in the Southern hemisphere), 2023, I received an invitation from Janaína to the Tiny Fest (in Otautahi, in Aotearoa) curatorial panel, in my kitchen, facing the fridge, we dance through a mixed conversation around care taking as a mother, as an artist at risk.
Where is the knowledge located?
… living room;
Where else is the library?
…. a fridge;
Behind the time?
Where is the location of the library? In time?
Dance, History and Contexts shelved in the Library;
A Dance library; a dance library;
The History of library; whose library?
and
How to dance (a) library?
co(n)text: a meeting place to read together, write together, sing together our dance histories.
I am invited to co-teach with a group of friends.
Dance History and Contexts is how the paper is called.
There is something charming in the impossible task of sharing a history. Whose history?
Who’s history?
Maryam and I sit for conversations on how we can un-do the threads of ‘singular narratives’ or how we unveil the behaviours that we carry that deceive time as if it was a straight, always forward-moving event.
We desire to tremble the conventions we seemed to be taught of on how a theory-based paper should be ‘delivered’ within an academic course at the same time that we feel excited to have four of us to challenge the authorial and authoritative roles of be(com)ing a history teacher.
We pose our risks of failing or becoming confusing or seemingly not moving ahead within the curricular timeframe.
There is an expectation that we break the boundaries of western hegemonic spaces of/for knowledge but sustain the ‘essence’ of teaching the ‘canon’
How do we ‘divide’ time?
Who am I?
The minor and the major positions/times/allocations make us question the invitation as we navigate falling, failing.
The sense of being a foreigner stepping into someone else’s terrain, breaking the law, being policed.
When allyship becomes threatened by the sense of having to be correct - or being constantly corrected by a peer - so no one has their contract terminated. We ask…
we try to summon others into the conversation
Iran- underground contemporary dance.
Brazilian diasporic contemporary performance
Taiwan-Wushu
we are told off for moving-out-of-the-outline:
“I am so worried they missed the chance of learning about the main history”
With the fall, a rush of adrenaline as we move counter, witnessing the tiny encounters of allyship, moving against by moving with, moving with by moving against.
We co-incide learning and teaching and testing and tasting and proving and falling and rising and flying and holding and letting go.
We let go.
We learn on the go.
We lean on a goal of having less goals.
We let time sit.
1
2
3
4
Months pass by
9
10
11
15
17
With a break from the role of teaching in ‘the school’ I find myself closer to my world. The third. The South.
With Brazilian quilombola Antônio Bispo dos Santos, Nêgo Bispo, (2015,49) I learn about communities that care for each other as a practice of existing. Far from home I get close to home as I sit with notions of curationship.
19
21
24
Months pass by
We return to Maryam’s living room, as we take a re-turn onto the folds of our friendship. She invites me to co-curate a project within a festival in Norway as I am twirling through the new role of be(com)ing appointed to ‘direct’ a tiny festival in the South Island of Aotearoa.
We land in a library.
Library in the North Europe
Library in the South Island
What is a library?
We sit with the notion of a library as a meeting place. A location where people gather with books and imagination—browsing, searching, reading, sitting, archiving, borrowing and returning. We dream of performance as a moment of encounter, one that puts in exposure the crossing limits of our ability to desire, dream, learn, re-imagine and enact.
We dream of performing libraries as embodied locations of knowledge as we perform the roles of co-curators of not one, but two minifestivals in coexistence despite its separatedness.
We cross-pollinate our roles.