Residencing invitation poétics: a choreographic process

Abstract

This research is a choreographic practice. It is a choreo-lingual exercise that dwells with notions of language, context and displacement as experiences of transition(ing). As a journey towards (and around) home, this trans-national study engages with logics and theoretical positions from Latin America alongside with Aotearoa (New Zealand). As part of my practice-led doctoral research, I propose a choreographic process that is crafted around the notion of an invitation poétics. In this practice, notions of host-guest relationships and the context of art residencies are the orientation devices for discussing issues on hospitality, the position of the “other” and counter-colonial approaches to dance practice, curationship and the locality of art/pedagogy. For this conference, I will focus on the discussion of Art residencies as curatorial terrains of be-longing, stepping into counter-colonial practices of curation. Valuing pluralist, poly relations that engage in response to a situated territory, I navigate with quilombola philosopher and quilombo historian Antonio Bispo dos Santos (2015) and Beatriz Nascimento (2018) to envision curatorial practices as experiences of confluence. To emphasise cura within the notion of curation is, amongst other things, to bring attention to care as the operative practice of election, one that operates less in the realms of selecting and vibrates more through the notions of healing and enchantment – curative exercises of making kin. I will share how, finding in art residencies a fertile ground for exploring invitation poétics, I have invited (and responded to invitations from) a range of people – amongst dancers, non-dancers, artists and non-artists – in extremely different contexts – schools, libraries, houses, churches, villages, studios, streets – and for disparate reasons, or with very distinct focuses – aesthetical, social, pedagogical and so on; and how these experiences led me to learn from notions of aquilombamento, provoking me to think of curatorial practices that value ecosystems of care, learning, experimenting, conversing and co-curating as a re:pairing practice that experiments through sensing belonging with place, time and relations through bio-interaction and cosmophilia.