
Rehabitating
.Dencuentro Dance Collective (composed by Amanda Romero Cánepa, Constanza Ruiz Campusano and Greta Salgado Kudrass) and Hend Elbalouty have the common compromise towards decolonisation practices, the importance of rituals in our work and the common interest in personal and social healing through collective practices.
Our proposal is to use the Take Heart Residency to open up spaces, in the fields of feminism and decolonisation, where we can exchange and research together about how our different practices can encounter, potentiate each other and aim towards the common goal of decolonising bodies.
We will orient the encounter of our knowledges, opening up the documentations, stories, histories and multiple identities of each of our 4 own bodies, towards decolonising female bodies, healing as part of performances and ritual as a way of integrating both aspects of decolonisation and healing.
Such as pain is part of healing processes, pleasure, as a measure of freedom (Adrienne Maree Brown) is necessary for healing, too. In this sense our reasearch is going to integrate the erotic as a source of power and knowledge (Audre Lorde) that will lead us through questions such as:
How can a performance become a collective healing practice with the public?
How much can we, as performers, dig into pain in this process of healing? How can we manage this pain responsibly? Where are our limits? How can we open and hold spaces, in which social denied pains can flourish and flow into the process of healing?
How can we acces our own erotic power beyond it´s comercialized reduction?
How can we work with body parts that are usually not moved, or in ways they are normally not used as they are socially and morally restricted, to move social constructs and acces topics that are socially denied?
WAY OF PROCEEDING
The timeframe that would suit us the best would be September and October 2022. Here we would use 1-2 Weeks of residency where we will exchange our practices, observe and feel how our different bodies react to them, how the practices influence each other and what does this exchange and encounter start to create.
The structure of our research will be laboratory work focused on a practice based exchange about ritual constructions feeded by the biographical accounts of female corporality and traumatic/healing content. We will research about the relation from our bodies to different objects and elements following the question of which objects could help us to decolonize our bodies regarding the aesthetics, rules and manners of social constructions transcribed in our own bodies.
Thanks to #TakeHeart Residency Programm in tanzhaus nrw

It was and is a big pleasure to meet Liad Hussein Kantorowicz and exchange with her in the frame of Choreographische Dialogue in PACT Zollverein!
We talked about the empowering aspect of Sexwork, she introduced me to the agency of post porn using our own sexuality to critic and point out colonial, sexist and racist structures surrounding us and in ourselves and offer resistance!
We talked about ritual practices in both: the sex and the dance/art performance (if there is w a difference, or where there is a difference)
We researched one of the physicalities of disobidience: crooked, not alligned, giving up to gravity, all over the place and taking space, being big and loud. Fuck the holly RUHE in this country!
Liad shared with me her amazing, radical works like 'Pussy' and 'No democracy here'. I am astonished. SO ON POINT, by twisting around power hierarchys, questioning our values. So relieving to see such and empowered naked female body on stage. Radical.
Empowerment in a moment where I felt very unsecure and self critical, thank you.
Thankful to Liad Hussein Kantorowicz and thankful to PACT Zollverein for offering us the space, the time and the conditions in which we could encounter.
Here I leave you one of her songs, because yessss, she´s also a great musician!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAL39v6kWw0
tabarak yadak! (was it like this, Liad?) Anyway: May your hands be blessed
Choreographische Dialoque Residency Programm in PACT Zollverein Essen
https://www.pact-zollverein.de/kuenstlerhaus/choreographische-dialoge

JUST LIVING MATTER
„One afternoon, when we were asking ourselves questions about the fetal development and life after that, we felt like a tumor. We felt our bodies as if they were tumorous matter, so unpleasant and extravagant.
We are an alienation of what we think we are, of our existence, of our bodies. Our bodies, which are growing from the sickness of the formation of life, of biological matter...
We work by creating images that transmit the alienation of life creation. We use both our bodies to create one single functioning „thing“. Partnering techniques are our tools to do so, by using lifts and contact points to create the illusion of a strange creature that forms and deforms. Apart from that we use also single bodies, to play with the separation and fusion of cells.“
with Amanda Romero Cánepa
https://termine.koeln.de/veranstaltung/21564238_inkubator-residenz-praesentation-tanzfaktur-koeln