“Heidi Seppälä from Helsinki (Finland) and Emmanuel Ndefo from Lagos (Nigeria) from the collective DANCO – School of Decolonising the Art of Dance, are invited for a Dance Research NRW residency in North Rhine-Westphalia to realise a project “Dancing towards ethical cross-cultural collaboration”.”

Our research focuses on the preconditions of being together; producing ethically sustainable methods of collaboration in creative environments and creating movement scores and tasks from these premises. We are thinking about practices and tools for collaboration, arriving at a situation as well as the preconditions for arriving.

The context of this research is a collective called DANCO – School of Decolonizing the Art of Dance. DANCO is a polyphonic, collaborative ensemble that produces new ways of thinking and working at the frontiers of art and science with the aim of questioning and making visible the power structures and hegemony of dance as art. We founded DANCO in 2020/2021 with the aim of creating an environment for dance performance and research where competence is not mirrored by any hegemonic culture, but where ways of being in the body are equated, explored and produced in equal relation to each other and the environment. In the European context, DANCO aims to free the practice and thinking of European dance from its colonial identity.

Our work begins by asking questions:
How can we construct a collaboration that allows for the specificity of the situation that arises between people at that moment and in that space? Can a common stage be the context in which everyone’s voice can be heard? How to create conditions for everyone without a shared working culture, when the context is inevitably unknown?

Discussion, brainstorming, round tables and movement are part of our methodology to raise questions both on and off stage, but above all we want to invite participants to think about the kind of coming together that creates a foundation for ethical intercultural collaboration. We will start by creating and presenting our first draft of the tool, a list of questions to be asked for the construction of a collaborative stage. There are already several lists of guidelines on what to consider when planning anti-racist/anti-prejudice projects, but we would create questions that take into account our particular context in order to create a space where the “ethical singularity” (Spivak) could be actualised.

We will challenge ourselves and our participants with personal processes of rethinking their own roles, status, values and privileges. The way forward in challenging oppression and inequality in our society is to challenge individual knowledge processes in both personal and professional environments. Together we can develop the blind spots of privilege that produce and perpetuate the silence of the subordinated. Inviting people to deconstruct patriarchal models within themselves through movement is a challenge we want to dig deep into and NRW is a space that supports and welcomes this kind of work.