writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

A similar process is at work in Neferet iti, 32 which exposes Berlin's lucrative business with a statue,
despising Egyptian claims for return. Oxana's introductory speech also denunciates the genderedracist
marketing campaign calling Nefertiti "the most beautiful migrant in town". The performer
embodies the statue's awakening to life in the Berlin museum where she is imprisoned and re‐traces
through dance the time‐spaces that brought her to Europe. In I step on air, Oxana also blurred the
lines (or as eL‐tayeb would say, "queered ethnicity") since she embodies simultaneously Ghanean‐
German poet May Ayim, meeting Afro‐US‐American poet and activist Audre Lorde, Rroma musician
Panna Czinka and Afroperuvian activist Delia Zamudio.
By interlinking abstract auto/biographical storytelling, these three pieces enable the audience to
auto/biographically perceive the performance which continues to show effect within them long after
the show. Making present sense of a future‐relevant past, Oxana's dance art hence profoundly
impacts memory transmission by shaping individualized accesses in a collective performance space. I
argue that the presumed ephemeral, short‐lived art of dance can be viewed as a long‐lasting
poetically political process.
Dancing Women's Lives: Feminist Diasporic Archives
For African [American] and [European] Jewish peoples these facts of history are our
facts of life. (...) Attempts to eradicate memory act as a roadblock to empowerment,
perpetuate a language of silence, enforce a politics of denial, and reinforce past suffering
into the present. 33
Many scholars have inquired literary and dramatic productions as an "imaginative archive." 34
Dance and storytelling however, are seldom brought together. 35 In the case of dance, the work of art is
alive and materially bound to the moving body of the dancer. In this case, the moving body of the
dancer is spiritually bound to the choreographer who created the piece since she performs her own
choreographies. Before choreographing, Oxana sometimes researches private and public, especially
artistic archives. Her work is in itself a "Living Archive", as suggested by the title of a publication by
the Heinrich‐Boell Foundation 36 , a vital acknowledgment of Oxana's contribution to writing our
stories. Oxana indeed re‐tells stories which are no longer "his"‐story and courageously performs
creative re‐presentations of the past into the present. She has revealed artistic consistency in her
dances, speeches and writing which, perceived as a whole, weave seemingly disparate elements into
clear patterns of racist legacy of violence and diasporic resistance to it. Her productions are in
themselves resistant to the invisibility of all those who do not conform to white patriarchal capitalist
norms. This resistance exists at four interconnected levels: 37
• the choice of the themes: women biographies;
• the form of the narrative: to disrupt linear time and contemporize the past;
• the choreographic intent: e.g. the scene of the struggle, emphasizing individual resistance to
Holocaust in Through Gardens;
• the kinesthetic forms of movement: her self‐named "Fusion" style dwelling in such diverse
sources as classic Indonesian and European dance, West African Dance and Hip Hop, Egyptian Raqs
sharqi, Modern Dance, Tai Chi among others.
perforMemory : Breathing in, Digging out 38
Past and present have a lot in common/a lot to do with each other. Much of the past
flows into our daily present. I do not see a big gap/ditch between past and present. 39
Oxana's choreographic memory operates through her movements, literally using her body to remember.
Her productions rejoin Nancy Millers concept of "transpersonal memory" by stressing "the
links that connect an individual not only backward in time vertically through earlier generations but
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