A dance by Anna Koch and Dinis Machado inspired by a dance by Courtney Alston that was inspired by the dance by Katherine Dunham.

Departing from the main topic of this exhibition. We came across the activist and writer Susan Anglada Bartley´s text ”The Decolonization of White Feminist Consciousness”. Through reading and confrontings it´s questions. We asked ourself´s who are we, sitting and reading this very material? Were is our consciousness and what is legitimation vs action?

We questioned the decolonization and the consequent postcolonial traces in our bodies in the field of choreography. Through a vague memory of an interview in a documentary film about the experimentel filmmaker Maya Deren we re-actualized the existance of Katherine Dunham, a legendary choreographer, dancer, activist and antrophologist, who developed her own dance teqnique and through choreography raised the awarness of the cultures of the african diaspora and the importance of her presence in the 20th century American dance scene. Through looking at films of her at Youtube we found  another video by Courtney Alston who is a young choreographer living somewhere in South Candada.  Besides this video we could find no information about the context and scale of the production or even where it was taken place. But we were fascinated with the cultural layers in this choreographic material. African-american traces were side by side with occidental modern dance and traces of orientalism. We wanted to learn this dance as we have done with many other techniques, making our white bodies  being a place for this non white dance to exist.