Dear readers and friends!

We are happy to be able to conclude another year with a new issue of our eZine Moving Interventions: “Between Non-cooperation and Community-building: Practices of Resilience in dance – through dance – because of dance”.

Decolonizing, anti-racist and anti-fascist practices of resistance, in dance, performance, activism or everyday life, are complex and draining. They take time and require resilience: on stage, off stage, behind the stage. Based on this starting point we invited dancers, choreographers and artists in our network to join us in thinking through a set of questions that occupied us this year, revolving around questions of resilience, non-cooperation and community building:

• Do you need to build your resilience off stage in order to be able to be on stage and face the audience? 
• Do anti-racist and decolonizing dance practices help you build resilience for everyday?
• What are your strategies of sustaining resistance and practicing resilience?
• What approaches towards building resilience do you follow in your work?
• How do you and do you at all cherish and support a community orientated flow in your (dance) life and have you personally been benefiting from transformative community building? What kind of emerging strategies do you experience?

The result of this engagement is a collection of contributions sharing thoughts and musings on dance practices in our current world and political environment, insights gained in research processes and reflections on projects. With a focus on dance and artistic practices in German-speaking contexts, this issue also draws on perspectives from a range of geographical and cultural contexts – from the Peruvian diaspora, via Sri Lanka and India, to research conducted in Mexico and projects in Switzerland. In the course of this journey, the various contributions articulate and embrace politics of togetherness, sharing, rejection, non-cooperation, embracing the aesthetics of work and repetition, of marked, mixed, discriminated, working and exhausted bodies. Tackling emotions of rage, surprise, frustration and love, some red threads that repeatedly appear throughout various contributions critically reflect not only racist, but very importantly also capitalist structures, and some opposing forces such as care, rest, remembering and resistance.

We wish to thank Pascale Altenburger, Melmun Bajarchuu, Joyraj Bhattacharjee, Nitsan Margolin, Sara Mikolai, Yolanda Morales, and Amelia Uzategui Bonilla for their rich contributions, which not only touch us on a personal and emotionally connected level but above all, inspire our work and motivate us to work towards establishing better working structures for all.

We would be happy about any feedback from you as well and if we would learn what thoughts have opened up for you as you engage with our eZine’s contributions (feel free to email us at: chakkars.moving.interventions@gmail.com). 

It would be wonderful if you feel invited and stimulated to initiate or continue the search for your own potentials and practice speaking from your own artistic body languages and to show them confidently and effectively on stages! We want to strengthen, empower and enable artistic-social-political participation – so let’s strengthen and empower each other – with each other!

Our thanks also go to Manoj Kurian (Design) and Anja Tracksdorf (Tracksdorf Translations) for their expertise and support to realize another edition of an eZine of moving interventions. We hope you will have an inspiring read!

Warmly,

Sandra Chatterjee, Sarah Bergh & Ariadne Jakoby

CHAKKARs – moving interventions

December 2022