Knitting Together Our Movement Network (Looking In Between Ourselves)

MULTÍLOGOS

Knitting Together Our Movement Network (Looking In Between Ourselves)

In 2019, four Latin American researchers, dance artists, and Choreomundus alumni created a team with the objective of opening a gate for sharing dance knowledge. Since that time, we have been seeking ways of co-constructing and disseminating knowledge in a horizontal way. That is, we aim to ensure that the knowledge that we co-create is accessible to the Spanish-speaking world broadly, and that our activities foster internal dialogues as well as facilitate cross-sector encounters. We recognize and wish to foster wider recognition of the value of diverse research and artistic achievements within Latin American contexts, including those that are often rendered invisible in academic institutions.

Thus, we created MULTÍLOGOS, a bi-weekly webinar about dance, corporealities, and movement. With an open call once a year, we invite Spanish-speaking audiences to share their reflections and artistic proposals through talks, interviews, debates, panels, workshops, or performative lectures. Whatever the modality, each webinar session includes a time dedicated to asking questions and giving feedback. Through the wide spectrum of these dialogues, and the opportunities that they have provided for listening to the realities of others, we have collectively developed a skill set as a method and as a goal.

Through a performative presentation in this ICTM Dialogues session, we highlight the main aspects of the MULTÍLOGOS webinar:

• Our personal stories as a motivation for the project and its further development with community: Through our own demographic analysis of MULTÍLOGOS outreach, we show the scope of geographies from which participants come, and their modalities of sharing knowledge. Such diversity constructs MULTÍLOGOS as a circle of multiple locations that is connected by threads of thought and action.
• Contents of the knowledge space: Grounded on a fabric of connections, confrontations, and co-constructions, we trace transversal axes in a rhizomatic path that connect through several topics. In this ICTM Dialogues session, we outline three topics that have repeatedly arisen in the MULTÍLOGOS webinar: gender identities and relations, Afro-Latin communities and mestizaje, Latin American resistance through dance.
• Enactment of decoloniality: We claim that the action of altering the circulation of knowledge has a decolonial potential to create a space for approaches from the Global South. Thus, we strongly believe that the biggest treasures lie in the plurality of voices, accents, gestures, and many times in diverse viewpoints and political positions that Western theories would never have imagined.
• Dialogue in itself as an epistemic practice: Throughout discussions about embodied activities, we value the epistemic dimensions arising from participants’ contributions, and the different realities of Spanish-speaking territories from which they come. Anchored in anti-racist and participatory concepts of learning, we maintain that dialogic practices change knowledge.

MULTÍLOGOS

Vernos a Nosotros Mismos

En el 2019, cuatro investigadores y artistas latinoamericanos egresados del programa Choreomundus, crearon un equipo con el objetivo de abrir un espacio para compartir conocimiento sobre danza. Desde entonces, buscamos co-construir y diseminar conocimiento de manera horizontal que sea accesible a la audiencia hispanohablante, provocando diálogos y polinizando encuentros entre sectores con distintos niveles de profesionalización. Nuestro objetivo es reconocer el valor de la diversidad de alcances artísticos e investigativos en el contexto Latinoamericano que es muchas veces invisibilizado en instituciones académicas.

Así, creamos MULTÍLOGOS, un webinario sobre danzas, cuerpos y movimientos con frecuencia de dos veces por mes. Por medio de una convocatoria anual, invitamos al sector hispanohablante a compartir sus investigaciones y propuestas artísticas a través de ponencias, entrevistas, debates, paneles, talleres o intervenciones performativas. Cada modalidad incluye un tiempo dedicado a hacer preguntas y dar retroalimentación. El amplio espectro del contenido de los diálogos así como la escucha a otras realidades es una destreza colectiva que hemos desarrollado como método y como meta.

En una presentación performativa, resaltamos los aspectos principales del webinario:

• Nuestras historias personales como motivación del proyecto y su desarrollo en comunidad: a partir de nuestro análisis del alcance de audiencia de MULTÍLOGOS mostramos la amplitud de las geografías desde las que provienen los participantes y sus modalidades de compartir conocimiento. Esta diversidad es la que construímos en MULTÍLOGOS como un círculo de múltiples localidades conectadas por hilos de pensamiento y acción.
• Contenidos del espacio de conocimiento: basados en un tejido de conexiones, confrontaciones y co-construcciones, trazamos ejes transversales en veredas rizomáticas sobre distintos temas. En esta ocasión referimos tres que han aparecido de manera recurrente en el webinario: identidades y relaciones de género, comunidades afrolatinas y mestizaje, y las resistencias en Latinoamérica desde el prisma de la danza.
• Accionar en la descolonialidad: Planteamos que proponer otras travesías de circulación de conocimiento tiene un potencial decolonial que crea un espacio para los enfoques del Sur Global. Por lo tanto, creemos que el tesoro más grande está en la pluralidad de voces, acentos, gestos y, muchas veces, diversos puntos de vista y posiciones políticas que las teorías de Occidente ni han alcanzado a soñar.
• El diálogo como práctica epistémica: A través de las discusiones sobre actividades corporalizadas, valoramos la dimensión epistémica que emerge en la interacción con los participantes, contrastando diferentes realidades de territorios hispanohablantes. Basados en principios pedagógicos participativos, sostenemos que la práctica del diálogo genera nuevos conocimientos.

Further References

As an emerging project, MULTÍLOGOS is shaping a blog in which all the sessions are further discussed and theorized. The material is in Spanish and can be found in the following link multilogosdanza.wixsite.com/conectar/blog

Reflections

In this session, we presented various points of focus for our Multílogos project, which uses performative and dialogical tools, and also summarized the content of our work. We chose to present ourselves and the origins of the project in a performative fashion, so that the audience could connect with our feeling-thoughts (sentipensares). As we summarized and translated the selected component that were performed during our ICTM Dialogues session, we cited many Latin American speakers and presentations that challenge anglophone scholarly research categorizations of dance practices.

In the last part of our presentation, “Latin American resistance through dance,” we highlight examples of the agency of dancers as political subjects. These examples make evident that our artistic and research works are contestations to the status quo that is imposed by clear-cut means of state repression in Latin American contexts. This awareness transcends understandings of what is typically categorized as “dance” according to hegemonic aesthetics, to foster a broader understanding of something that carries ancestral, improvisational, and innovative knowledge. We intentionally facilitated a dialogue in the Q&A by asking the audience to consider their understandings of ‘resistance’ in order to stimulate our own imaginations as scholars working toward decolonization.

Questions to Consider

How can decoloniality serve to interrogate the processes of legitimation regarding dance practices and knowledge in Latin America?

How is decoloniality nurtured by the contributions of an international community that discusses dance and the multi-sensorial in languages other than English?

What are the ways that researchers and artists from around the globe articulate their resistance to different modes of oppression?