Embodied Temporalities
Tracing narratives across Europe
Partners: Oyoun (Germany), SHOUT Festival of Birmingham LGBT (UK), Dafa Puppet Theater s.r.o. (Czech Republic), Play Perform Learn Grow (PPLG) (Greece)
What memories do our bodies hold? What can our bodies tell us about ourselves, pasts, and futures? Through Embodied Temporalities – Tracing the memories our bodies hold, the core artistic work of this Perform Europe project, cultural practitioners explore identities, belonging and embodied memories through diasporic, decolonial and queer perspectives. Embodied Temporalities is a research, archiving, exhibition and performance project under the artistic direction of Madhumita Nandi.
The partners behind this project will provide opportunities for mutually benefitting collaborations, from collective healing and empowerment to increasing the understanding of intersectional realities lived in the diaspora. The touring process of this project will be rooted in community engagement through a residency, conversations and localised performances at the SHOUT Festival in the UK. In the Czech Republic, the cultural centre Dafa Puppet Theater will offer caring, non-gentrifying cultural and artistic mediation with local communities, and will host live performances, screenings and local conversations at the Liv’in Festival 2022. PPLG – Performing Across Borders, Greece, will curate nurturing exchanges between performers and refugees in empowering artist workshops and performances through trauma-informed facilitation.
Under the artistic direction of Madhumita Nandi, Embodied Temporalities includes two touring projects by the following lead artists:
Ahmad BaBa
Ahmad BaBa is setting a ground for investigating identities on the level of bodies.
The residencies, screenings, workshops, discussions and performances will combine the dual disciplines that Ahmad is engaged in: performing arts and dance therapy.
On this spectrum Ahmad is investigating how systemic oppression is embedded in lived experiences of communities who are by default marginalised. How bodies hold notions of shattered identities, shame, and disrupted narratives that become the biographies they start to believe in about their own existence in this world. How to achieve therapeutic transformation when systems of oppression are still reproduced, even inside of mental health facilities, that most of marginalised identities have no access to? This residency is a space to exchange on these questions, centralising the immense cruciality of one’s own embodied experiences and polylithic identities that are affected by power structures and colonial narratives. To attend a cycle of a transformative awareness, the process cannot be individualistic,only, like many types of commodified western appropriated practices that pathologise non-hedonic behaviours, but rather its a relational collectivist approach that ideally understands community-based work as an act of change by itself.
His project will include screenings, panel discussions, critical dance therapy workshops, and a performative installation curated by the artist.
Gugulethu 'Dumama' Duma
Dumama, born Gugulethu Duma, is a South African future folk performing artist, songwriter and cultural researcher. Inspired by issues around inequality and displacement, she is concerned with projects exploring cultural preservation, presence and contemplations on futurity. Her interests intersect as practice based performance research, and interdisciplinary, collaborative bodies of work centred around political-poetic imaginations.
Reimagining folk music of ancestors, living and deceased, Dumama works with the voice, live loops, hand-made bow instruments, glitches and distortions. Fascinated by sound’s power, the tonal emergence and decay in certain frequencies and emotions evoked within these frequencies, Dumama passionately explores sound as a tool for social transformation and healing.
February 2022
SHOUT Festival [also hybrid/digitally] in Birmingham, UK
Mon 21 Feb
Manuscripts of Foreign Bodies – Screening & Discussion
Live at Midlands Arts Centre: here // Ticket Registration: here
Tue 22 – Wed 23 Feb
Deconstructing the Aesthetics of Embodiment – Workshop
Live at Midlands Arts Centre: here // Ticket Registration: here
Thu 24 Feb
QueeЯevolutions – Screening & Discussion
Live at Midlands Arts Centre: here // Ticket Registration: here
Sat 26 Feb
Ilk عِلْق – Performative Exhibition/ Installation
Live at Vivid Projects // Ticket Registration: here
April 2022
LIV’in Festival / Pod Třešní [also digitally] in Kladno and Prague, Czech Republic
Fri 22 April 2022 – 19:00
(De)Coding Trajectories – The body was always a centre of an ongoing investigation
Live at Studio Alta: here // More info about the ceremony: here
Watch the recording of the live stream: here
MAY 2022
Performing Across Borders (PPLG) on Lesvos, Greece
Residency in Mytiline, Greece from 24th until 29th of May, Partner PPLG
This international collaboration is made possible by Perform Europe. Perform Europe is an EU-funded project aiming to rethink how performing arts works are presented across borders in a more inclusive, sustainable and balanced way by testing new touring and distribution practices and providing policy recommendations for a future EU support scheme. This 18-month journey includes a research phase, launching a digital platform, testing a support scheme, and designing policy recommendations.
Perform Europe is funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and co-managed by a Consortium of 5 organisations: IETM – International network for contemporary performing arts, the European Festivals Association (EFA), Circostrada, EDN – European Dancehouse Network, and IDEA Consult.
