Performance-presentation for the 27th AEMI conference “At home or alienated” Husum 5-7 October 2017.
While the primordial elements for the performance are of various natures (the text, the dance, the costume and the shared presence between audience and myself) the present document gives account of the text displayed with a feminine voice-over, the 7th of October as a closure to the 27th AEMI Conference in the Nordfriesland Museum of Husum.
The 15 minutes long poem, is a composition based on short phrases, expressions, and questions proposed during the two-day meeting, attending the 27 presentations and discussions during the Conference, added to testimonials from personal interviews with migrants (in diverse contexts) and fragments of my own academic/artistic research.
Therefore, I believe that the text is a co-created poem whose authors are the members of AEMI, the participants of the conference, and myself.
The costume is a paper dress, elaborated in diverse layers of the documents, certificates and diplomas I am asked for before any trip in order to get a Visa, and the ones I needed in 2012 for a marriage permit in EU. The costume entangles in itself the concept of the real body, the flesh, the human who is hidden, covered and disguised under all nominations, titles, and classifications.
The choreography was composed using my own gestural vocabulary developed when guiding diverse dance workshops called “Creative Tradition”- with immigrant communities in South Korea (Vietnamese and Philippines 2014-2016), Belgium (Spanish and Latinos 2015) and Italy (South African 2017). A different element in the dance was added after historical and embodied research on features from Pērkoņdancis (Latvian dance), Kaskarotak (Basque dance), Tinku (Bolivian warrior dance), and physical theatre techniques.
Fragments:
What, if anything,
can we learn from history?
Or perhaps, we can learn from herstory?
From our story?
Their story?
Why?
Because perhaps my story is also yours.
What does it feel like to be a Frisian?
How does it feel to be an American?
A Roma?
A Latvian?
A European?
A non-European?
(...)
Excuse me, I am new in town...Where is your History Museum? In the basement, because history is in the base of any national conceptual construction. What stories are told? What stories are not told?
(...)