ΣΧΕΤΙΚΌΤΗΤΑ
RELEVANCE
The shifting foci and evolution of my research:
Initially, I was drawn to undertake this research because I work alongside dance artists from multiple cultural backgrounds, as well as myself practising/existing between two cultures, two hemispheres and two languages, namely Greece and Aotearoa. I wanted to approach the practice with a deeper awareness, care, and ability to hold, honour, and uplift the backgrounds of the many diverse dance-artists I work with. Many of the graduates from The New Zealand School of Dance, for example, come from diverse cultures. Many of the artists in Aotearoa/New Zealand come from Māori, Pasifika, Asian, Eastern European, Middle Eastern (the list goes on) backgrounds, and are not necessarily or exclusively connected to Anglo-European traditions. Yet the template which we adopt, with little query, behaves as though everyone does. The ‘norm’, the standard we continue to use when creating choreographies, dramaturgies, scenographies, and curation, is strongly situated in an eurocentric pedagogy, approach, expression and delivery.
I want to be clear that I do not want to diminish the benefits of having a common-practice, as a standard ‘code’ can be a joining-place and a unifier, but I argue that one cultural lens should not then dominate or minimise the multitudinous and complex voices of the many others.
At the beginning of this research, I described my work as cross-cultural. This remains true, but there has been a shift in the way I now inter/intra-act with the ethnography and auto-ethnography of this practice. Within my practice-research I am giving more conscious space to examining where movement, methodology, industry protocols, and styles originate from. I am interested in how the artistic choices we make, and often unconsciously, re-cement, re-condone, and re-canonise fixed patriarchal, colonising systems that can ignore the rich potentialities of the many other ways of being-thinking-creating.
“
...THE BECOMING PRESENCE OF MULTIPLE SUBJECTIVITIES.”
– ANNALISA PICCIRILLO
Relevance to self as a practitioner/as a being:
We are often expected to identify as one thing or another. To work within binary, linear, rigid systems that do not regularly allow for the nuisanced,the complex, the layered realities of identity. One can be many things simultaneously, with each component inter-acting and translating into a cohesive self.
We are in continuous synthesis:
We are evolving, re-covering, and re-assessing beings. When we give ourselves the permission to enfold the numerous divergences, irregularities, idiosyncrasies, seeming contradictions within ourselves, we are better placed to respond, empathise and create alongside others. We are better placed to hold the door open for others to walk though.
‘These practices challenge and resist the “colonial matrix of power” (Mignolo, 2018b, p. 91), and their discourse points towards “the existence of multiple worlds that are partially connected but that exceed each other in complex ways” (Fitzgerald, 2022, p. 353).’ – Victoria Hunter et al.