Danza y Frontera (Museum version)

Endangered Human Movements Vol. 4

Performance

“ A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short: those who cross over, pass over, and go through the confines of the “normal”.

Gloria Anzaldúa

Danza y Frontera ( Museum version) corresponds to the fourth volume of the research on “Endangered Human Movements” * and it is based on a dance that has its roots in an ancient prehispanic dance form that was later used by the Spanish Crown, (Casa Austria /Habsburg) to develop the conquest of Mexico as a Danza de Conquista, a conquest dance.

This old dance which is intertwined with re -enactments of the battles in Europe between Mors and Christians, it is actualized today in by the dancers from the hood of El Ejido Veinte of Matamoros, Tamaulipas (MX), in a context of extreme violence related to a border where narco traffic, militarization, and cheap labor industries meet.

The museum version happens inside the exhibition Pattern and Decoration where new U.S American creolisations of non western and feminine art resonate with the voices of all art forms that have been miss regarded by the western cannon.

The museum function here a place of occupation and not of legitimation.

In the context of the advancement of Fortress Europe. Danza y Frontera is a rebellious act. As border subjects, the performers inhabit a place in between, understanding its power and limitations, dancing beyond all notions of borders be they cultural, national or aesthetic.

 

Watch trailer here

 

* Endangered Human Movements is the title of a long-term project, started in the year 2014, focusing on human movement practices which have been cultivated for centuries all over the world. Inside this frame a series of performances, workshops, installations, publications and a comprehensive online archive are developed which reconstruct, re-contextualise and re signify human movement practices in danger of disappearing, aiming at unleashing their future potential.