Tira Kuna – Dances of Earth

Endangered Human Movements Vol. 5

Performance

Tira Kuna – Dances of Earth is a new piece to be developed with dance students of the Stockholm University of the Arts as their graduation work.

It is part of the research of the fifth volume of Endangered Human Movements* titled  Climatic Dances.

Inspired by the work of Mexican anthropologist Alessandro Questa, on two dances from the Northern Highlands of Puebla performed by indigenous Masewal people,  in a context of climate change and mining exploitation. These two dances “Tipekajomeh” and “Wewentiyo” constitute the beginning of a trip towards the depths of the mountain and towards the re enchantment of that which modern colonial science called Geology.

In this series of works Amanda Piña  explores the way the notions of earth have transformed through time and through different historical genealogies and ontologies. The biographical landscape of the artist, a particular mountain in the central Andes in Chile, which is today being destroyed by Neo-extractive forces through various mining and becomes a place from where to share grief and fury, to mourn and stand up.

Climatic Dances is an embodied  visual effort to practice new ancestral ways of relating with the living world.

“These so-called ‘traditional’ dances stand in fact as creative social devices to visualize and intervene into socio-environmental relations, stressing the interdependence between all life forms in this mountainous region.”

Alessandro Questa

* 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.