Dear readers!

Welcome to the inaugural edition of our new eZine “Moving Interventions”.

At the end of the busy year 2021, we are proud and happy to be able to share seven contributions by choreographers and dancers under the title Ambiguous Potentials // Performative Awakenings on topics, which have occupied our work at CHAKKARs for three years now.

We are continuously interested in how artists see their work, how dancers in particular reflect on their bodies and body language, how they explore in their performances how their own expressive abilities began. To what extent were and are your possibilities of expression restricted by discriminatory, racial, sexist, trans-hostile use in dance? How do they situate themselves in the cultural apparatus and in the climate of art spaces in Germany, that do not invite everyone to uncover their own potential? These processes of artistic growth and individual, conscious historiography are protracted, often result in setbacks and, above all, are painful.

How the eZine started

In 2020, the year of the first lockdown, we too were challenged to rearrange our plans and adapt them to the fact that there could not be any “live” events – and thus no personal exchange and no analogue imaginative spaces. So we opened virtual spaces to keep in touch with the people who enrich and inspire our work.

As a result we asked dancers, choreographers and artists in our environment about their (life) situation during the very first phase of the pandemic. In the same year, in addition to the restricted radii of (artistic) freedom of movement, a completely different situation was added when, after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 26, 2020, Black Lives Matter demonstrations were organized around the world and have loudly and confidently turned the streets – the public space – into a place of debate, rather an overdue awareness of racism.

We wanted to know what our friends and artistic associates think about body, protest, resistance and healing in these circumstances. In 2020 a virtual think tank (www.think-tank.chakkars.de) emerged from this, with contributions from Ariadne Jakoby, Olivia Hyunsin Kim, Angela Guerreiro, Mario Lopes, Mzamo Nondlwana and Srabanti Bhattacharjee.

Within the CHAKKARs team, the rich thoughts that were articulated in the virtual think tank gave us an opportunity to think further, and so the idea of the eZine “Moving Interventions” was born – and the result is now available!

Ambiguous Potentials // Performative Awakenings

In this first edition of “Moving Interventions” we are asking about ambiguous potentials and performative awakenings.

The space of performance, be it a stage, a public space, a digital platform, or the like, is a space of ambiguity. It can make the performing body vulnerable by subjecting it to the discriminating gaze of the audience. But it can also become a platform for empowerment, open the possibility of sharing, mutual healing, dialogue and exchange.

Based on this starting point we invited dancers/choreographers to share ideas, approaches, questions, thoughts, artistic experiments that address theses ambiguities, for example via the following questions:

– do you remember a moment of political awakening in relation to dance?

– can you think of an experience of racism that was also empowering?

– how does racism manifest itself in dance?

– how does the dancing body move between negotiating the audience’s gaze and articulating an emancipating position?

– what are the possibilities of using the stage for decolonizing and empowering interventions?

We are grateful that seven artists have accepted our invitation to describe in this publication how they have experienced moments of awakening and growth. How they have opened up their own free spaces, how overwhelming the feeling, the different emotions, are again and again, which “discharge” when (finally) like-minded people are found, when one’s own artistic potential is less of a cause for shame, intimidation and emotional defence, but quite the opposite, comes to bloom and awakens and grows and can be shared.

We wholeheartedly thank Nora Amin, Keith Zenga King, Sarah Lasaki, Hannah Ma, Rani Nair, Amanda Piña, and Suzette Sagisi for their contributions, which are mutually enriching through recurring themes such as the relationship between (white) audiences and performers of color, eye level, decolonizing performance and curation strategies that rethink this relationship. In addition they discuss internalized racisms, the normative, exclusionary ‘violence’ in (infra)structures of ballet and possibilities for healing.

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 Amanda’s, Sarah’s, Keith’s, Hannah’s, Suzette’s, Rani’s and Nora’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 to learn to speak 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 go to Nora Amin, Keith Zenga King, Sarah Lasaki, Hannah Ma, Rani Nair, Amanda Piña, Suzette Sagisi, Manoj Kurian, Anja Trackdorf (Tracksdorf Translations) and Veronika Wagner for the realization of this first, very powerful, edition of “Moving Interventions”.

We hope you will have an inspiring read!

Warmly,

Sandra Chatterjee, Sarah Bergh & Ariadne Jakoby

CHAKKARs-moving Interventions

December 2021