WS 11 Remembering Pleasure: an improvisation-based act of resistance
Citing Peruvian dances from the African diaspora, this class invites movers to engage with their creative, sensing-thinking selves, moving to polyrhythmic music. These ancestral dances source the memory of communal resistance and celebration revived in Peru between the 1950s-70s and continue to be practiced today. This session invites you to take this time to feel into your body, perhaps try-on a new dance language, be in community, finding your fun through your movement, your medicine.
Open to all levels of dance experience and to all bodies. BIPOC identities and members of the Latinx Diaspora are especially welcome. Guided in both English and German.
Amelia Uzategui Bonilla
Amelia Uzategui Bonilla (she/they) works towards researching and implementing decolonized approaches to dance teaching and making. She is currently based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and works alongside Mareike Uhl and Dörthe Krohn as a co-artistic and production management team leading the ID_Tanzhaus Frankfurt Rhein-Main. Amelia is currently an associate professor at the Frankfurt University for Music and the Performing Arts (HfMDK) from where they are also an alumnus. They seek to recognize negated stories from the African diaspora and Native communities in Abya Yala. Though professionalized in the United States and Germany, Juilliard BFA Dance, HfMDK MA Contemporary Dance Education, Amelia reclaims epistemologies from the South as part of their culture and artistic identity. She amplifies the work of collaborators and colleagues who destabilize the coloniality of power in contemporary dance contexts through her writing, teaching, and independent productions. Amelia’s 2021 work, “Perfectionism Detox,” won a postgraduate grant from the Hessische Theaterakademie. Amelia’s 2022 production, “How I learned to Love,” includes research on Afro- Peruvian Contrapunto which was financed by a #takeheart residency at the Künstler:innenhaus Mousonturm. Their writing has been published in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, the San Francisco magazine In Dance, and CHAKKARs – Moving Interventions e- zine, forthcoming.