writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

Rather than only recounting history through dance, this choreographing and
choreography also presented itself as historical research tool and document. [It]
functioned both as a way of researching (...) with theoretical insight and historical
legitimacy, and as itself embodied documentation, with archival value. This in turn
challenged a familiar divide that sees art making, such as choreography, as separate from
the acts of historical documentation and of theorizing (...) 19
By commissioning Oxana to create "I step on air" for the EDEWA exhibition 20 produced within
Humboldt‐University's "May‐Ayim‐Seminar", lecturer and curator Natasha A. Kelly contributed to reestablishing
a link between scholarly and artistic cultures. Dance as the bodily art breathing "qualities
disvalued within the Western intellectual tradition ‐ emotion, intuition, collectivity, nonlinearity, the
oral" is a space of "coexistence of different identities, sites, voices, and ideas".21 The gendered,
racialized, ableist connotations bound to the body within western heteronormative patriarch
capitalism should precisely move our quest to question the moving body as a site of alternative
discourses and empowering praxis. I wish to call for a broader inclusion of agency in dance, as a field
to be stridden in postcolonial and gender studies and as an art to be performed within and around
the academic space.
Women Living Dance: auto/biographical storytelling and memory
Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted,
appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary practices. 22
Dance Oxana Chi, Through Gardens, Berlin Dance Studio 2010.
© Layla Zami
shapes complex negotiations of reclaiming body movement when feet have been chained,
tongues silenced,
hands bound to work.
Remembering that
"black dance itself
embodied a resistance
to the confinement of
the body solely to
wage work" 23 , let's
realize the exploitation
of dancers in
contemporary times of
so‐called
where
"crisis"
diasporic
people are still
expected to be
working
either
migrants,
high‐qualified
consumptioncosmopolitans
or
highly‐flexible exploited‐minorities. Hélène Marquié, one of a few scholar‐performers, reminds us
that "the work of dancers is unremitting, while its public visibility and acknowledgement through
wage are intermittent." 24 In this context, solo performances open and occupy "fluid embodiedimaginary,
historical‐contemporary spaces" 25 , slashing back and forth across the auto/biographical.
"Through Gardens" aims to revive the memory of Tatjana Barbakoff, a Chinese‐Latvian‐Jewish
dancer who was very famous in the 1920s/30s in Europe but has been left out of institutional
memory ever since she got murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. "Neferet iti" is a postcolonial critique of
820