Dance Research NRW awarded artists share impressions of their research and talk about how contemporary dance and rituals shape social realities throughout their journey.
Dance Research NRW is an international scholarship programme initiated and supported by NRW KULTURsekretariat funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Dance Research NRW addresses dancers, performers and choreographers for whom it enables residencies for several weeks, unrelated to concrete artistic productions. It aims to promote experimental working practices which expand professional skills and networks. Focusing on interdisciplinary encounters, it invites new aesthetics and opens spaces for exploration and discovery. The supported artists or artistic research projects relate to one or more of the 20 member cities of the NRW KULTURsekretariat. The programme fosters mobility for artists coming to the NRW region from abroad or starting from the NRW region and traveling abroad.
Episode 1 Deep into Unheard Cosmologies with Maria Mercedes Flores Mujica
Feminine inspiration, rituals of joy and pelvic liberation.
For her research, Maria traveled to Egypt to visit the Temple of Hathor, the cow goddess of love, birth, death, and the afterlife.
Episode 2 The Lennie Dale Scores – celebrating queerness and empowerment with Frederico Mendes Teixeira
Transmission, contraculture and Rio Funk.
For his research, Frederico traveled to Brazil. He dived into a subjective archive of Lennie Dale and followed the cry of boldness exploring the living culture of today’s Rio de Janeiro.
Episode 3 Dancing towards ethical cross-cultural collaboration with Heidi Seppälä and Emmanuel Ndefo
On togetherness, shared work culture and ethical responsibility.
Heidi and Emmanuel dedicated their research in Cologne to challenge Western dominance in dance and fostering a culture of equality, love, and social justice.
Episode 4 Everything is Movement for Me with Jodie Judy Lu YingChu
An exploration of Sound Geometry and the resonance of industrial heritage.
Jodie is an independent interdisciplinary dance artist from Taiwan who traveled for her research to Düsseldorf, Essen and the Ruhr area.
Episode 5 Performing Power / The man who takes space with Gustavo Gomes
About layers of history, the practice of deep listening and how to rethink discovery.
Gustavo Gomes, dance artist based in Cologne, Germany, traveled to Lisbon to research on occupation of space, and the influence of colonialism on the construction of masculinity.
Episode 6 Forever House of Mirrors with Gaia Pellegrini
A relational journey into FLINTA perspectives on the female image in popular culture.
Starting from Essen, Germany, Gaia embarked on a journey across Italy, along the way deconstructing and subverting the popular narratives surrounding the Miss Italia beauty pageant.
Episode 7 Dancing the echoes from within the Ordinary with Ayaka Nakama
Dance as a meeting place, where memories, people and geographies flow.
The starting point of this research was a practice to think about places suitable for dance. First case study became the ‘KIOSK’ of the NRW region and the stories of the people working in such late night shops. Because “to make art in the everyday is to refuse the erasure of ordinary life” (Audre Lorde).
Episode 8 Yarning: Do mothers have a country? with Meghna Bhardwaj
On the agency of entanglement and the politics of choice.
Starting from collective knitting, Meghna tells stories of feminist border-crossing through dance. We well talked about her journey from New Delhi to Cologne and about what weaves diverse narratives together into a community.