It is movement. that is what it does: it moves things.

Each and every morning,
When ‘warming-up’ my body, preparing for my daily dance practice - or simply when crawling out of bed, in more or less glorious ways depending on the days,
I like to rewind a little bit, and play the scene again.
To retrace the events.
I Love going through,
Again and again,
Over just a few minutes,
The millenaries of Evolution that led the molluscs we once were,
To get out of the water.
To integrate this huge shell into a skeleton.
And to wander,
Peacefully,
Across various locomotor experimentations,
Towards verticalization, and language.

Now what if bipedalism was just a phase in our species evolution?
A stage, in the unroll of these crawling beings we once were.
What would be next? 

As a dancer, but also simply as a curious human being, I am haunted by dozens of questions like these among others that the associated audiovisual piece here raises. Where does the sky begin? What does the sky look like, seen from the sky? Does water have a reflection? I guess they constitute my very own foundation, my grounding: the starting point of any of my endeavours. If each work of Art is based on an obsessive idea, then these might be mine. In this article, I am trying to show how I humbly believe I am committed, through my practice, to an ongoing, reflexive process of decolonization that recognizes difference as a uniting principle, and I invite my fellow creators to consider these arguments, for us to possibly collectively reshape our approach to our craft and its potential.

We exist and manifest through this time when decolonization, anti-racism movements and indigenous power resurgence all unfold alongside climate related emergencies, far-right populism and ever-surging neoliberal capitalism. An era Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández describes as “[ …] neither spontaneous nor natural, but the outcome of complex dynamics of colonization and the resulting diasporas and genocides produced by United States and European imperial expansionism” (42). Reconsidering our potential roles in relation to decolonization allows us to challenge categories and by that, logics of inclusion and exclusion: “It is about imagining human relations that are premised on the relationship between difference and interdependency, rather than similarity and a rational calculation of self-interests” (Gaztambide-Fernández 49).

As far as I can remember, I always wanted to move. Ride my bike like crazy just to feel what speed was like; jump into the water off cliffs to experiment with falling and eventually do something with it–backflips, pirouettes or whatever, anything to challenge gravity. As a kid, I did not really care about naming what I did: I simply did it. Growing up, I have tried to maintain that playful and uninhibited approach to movement.

I started dancing with breaking, at the end of the nineties as a kid pursuing sensation over form. Because I wanted to spin on my head, move like a ninja, do all the tricks and act like it was easy. I understood quite soon that there was much more to this whole hip-hop culture beyond the few moves I knew and so I quickly embarked on an adventure that was going to last about twenty-five years and lead me to travel quite a lot, as well as to make my childhood hobby into a passion and a profession.

Then, I had an accident and got hurt. Pretty bad. I spent a few months immobilized, being given distinct pieces of advice and directions from a bunch of different doctors, before finally undergoing surgery and being restricted again, then going through a couple of months of a rehabilitation cycle. It is not my intention to bother the reader with pathos and details here but the long story short is that I went through the usual narrative from doctors—the classic drama, almost movie-like for any dancer—explaining to me that I had to rethink my entire trajectory because dancing might be over for me.

Of course, somehow, preventing a dancer from dancing is like preventing a fish from swimming: it drowns. Not in water but in some other sort of depth.

Of course I did not listen.

I am a dancer out of necessity. I belong to this generation that discovered the World—this World—at the same time as we learned about its upcoming collapse and felt it shift beneath our feet. Jump, rebound, slide, change direction, switch side, adapt—move, then think: the natural order. Only after, eventually, seek poetry out of it.

I adapted. It took me starting everything all over again, from scratch. I learned again and to do that, I first had to unlearn. Because of course our movement practices are—when you specialize in a discipline—a case of the snake biting its own tail: in addition to our motor patterns and body’s memory of the paths we are comfortable walking because we have walked them so many times, our specific physicality and aptitudes, developed together with our singular techniques, take us further and further away from the possibility of getting out of them. They form a corridor.

The corridor, an example:

• I am comfortable with floorwork or acrobatics -> I spend a lot of time working on it so I

• develop more floorwork skills -> in so doing, I develop a physicality specific to floorwork ->

• not only will I always be more comfortable with floorwork but I will always be less comfortable

• once I am back upright:

  1. Because I will be lacking resources since I will have worked less on it, and

  2. Because my own corporality, developed on the ground, will make the task even harder, physically speaking.

Specialization is then a bottomless pit: the more you specialize, the more you might have to shake off to get some fresh air. I believe that doctors tend to also lean towards that bottomless pit, underestimating unknown patients’ capacities to reinvent themselves.

Questioning, imagining, manifesting | poetry and superpowers

Haven’t you ever dreamt
When you were a kid
To board a soap bubble
And pushed by some gentle magic and fairy Dance dust
Hence travel
Free from all weight and the mechanical strains of this World
Against all odds
To live delicate like air
Light as a caress
And maybe more?

I started moving again along with questioning everything—questioning, for example, the very confrontational approach to floorwork that breaking (and hip-hop dance more generally) comes with: its necessity for inherent body tonicity and strength, to keep pushing, bouncing, moving on the floor level though never embracing the ground, never abandoning one’s weight into it, never finding actual support on it in order to be able to pop back up. Constantly challenging gravity instead of moving with it.

I discovered a duality to be observed—a dialectic of two antagonist approaches and qualities, in relation to the law all living beings submit to: Gravity. First there is the defying approach that practices hard, trains, works the body, that defies gravity, that always aspires to more: to jump higher, run further, turn or flip faster, etc. “No pain, no gain.” (What an imperialist/capitalist/colonial approach, no?).

But challenging this physical constant seems to be vain and maybe worse, insane. At the end of the day, eventually, there might only be rupture, injury (which I experienced first-hand), death—whether actual or symbolic. Do you remember Icarus?

To this approach, we can oppose the malicious one—subtle, playful, smart. Sensitive too, one that understands, feels, accepts and plays with gravity. Because gravity is no bad news or, if it is, then it is a very good one too: our physical body is an absolutely amazing mechanical figure that allows us to relate to gravity with finesse and intelligence. To submit, surrender and look for efficiency. To accept gravity and to take advantage even of the falling. My dancer’s Life changed the day I understood that falling was actually movement. Generating momentum. With its own inertia, speed, axis and its own sort of momentary gravity state. Because in dancing, falling is blasphemy: you should not even mention it. Falling can only be the result of a mistake—your mistake; if you fall, you are the one to blame. But once you feel it is rather a wave that you can surf as any other, you will enjoy even intentionally removing support from the floor for yourself sometimes.

Sure, it requires availability, reflex, spontaneity. Embracing the chaos in a second. But this actually is an approach that is relatable—and that could be a step towards decolonizing our Circus practices too, still very often dictated by the idea that it has to be incredible, extraordinary. Elitist. Exclusive. The artist who falls is one step closer to me. The one who seizes it as an opportunity creates a whole perspective shift for us all.

As usual, only the excess is harmful and the truth probably lays somewhere in the middle. I do not believe that either of these two approaches is better than the other or has to be exclusively chosen— the line is thin between contentment and laziness. I always like a challenge too. And embracing duality is not contradiction: it is broad vision.

I thus embarked on a quest for softness, delicacy. Slowness also. Flexibility (beyond suppleness —lots of very supple people actually lack flexibility). I found my way to move again, differently— “same, but different”—and surprisingly enough, I loved the process a lot. The idea of being a newbie again, to the point that I guess I had to stick to that beginner’s mindset.

Five years ago, in the midst of the first COVID-19 stay-at-home order, I got myself a big new toy to experiment with at home: a Cyr wheel. I had been seeing these in videos for quite a while but never had an opportunity to try one. So, when we got to spend a couple of months at home, I seized the opportunity to buy one, to empty my living room and to start something new again—past the age of thirty. I now enjoy playing with it everyday, particularly outside of the strictly performative and acrobatic traditional use of the apparatus. I find a whole lot of joy experimenting in, on and around the Cyr wheel; designing and playing by using a dancing approach to the apparatus that is unique to me, precisely because I taught myself.

I humbly believe my personal trajectory is an illustration of how much movement can be a tool, a medium for transformation: physical, mental, spiritual. Social and political too, of course (ask any Social Circus professional about it). It is movement, that’s what it does: it moves things. Physically and metaphorically—in space, as in minds. It reorganizes, reshapes, replaces, redirects.

Transforming perception, one pirouette at a time

They say: “when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” We also know that our “reality” is only based on the perception we have—through our senses—of the World that surrounds us. What if changing the way we look at things actually allowed us to see them … as they are?

When you flip yourself upside down, and you look at the horizon,
By the sea or in the mountains for instance,
You understand,
That even up, and down, are altogether quite relative concepts.
That the sky also has a shore.
That we actually observe this World through a kaleidoscope, that fuses and confuses
Celestial and abyss.
Sensations and temptations.
Memories and omens.
Dreams, and reality.
And it sometimes comes down to tiny little details.

Maybe Narcissus never fell, maybe he was abducted.

Maybe one witnessed the entire scene wrong, one puddle away from the truth.

Each one reach one – each one teach one

As dancers, circus artists, poets—as movement artists in general—of bodies or ideas—we know that our practices, if only pulled out of a strict demonstrative intention canal, have this incredible capacity to shed light on so many things about how humans relate to themselves, to each other and to their environment—like a magnifying glass. This is precisely why I love Dance so much: it is an amazing laboratory of human sciences as it stands at the intersection between individual expression and collective celebration (the opposite possibly being true too: collective expression and self-celebration). And provocation. It is only because I work with such a powerful pedagogic tool that I have so much interest in working with amateurs.

I thus like to consider the workshops I offer as contexts conducive to experiment on, test, reinforce or dismantle representations and stereotypes. And my creations as a showroom, a window open on these human relationships’ beauty—between them, to their space, their environment, to gravity or else body intelligence and group intelligence, organizations, structures, reactions to a situation, a momentum, an inversion, etc. On stage as in real Life, we are in the presence of bodies that are also persons: mentalities, dispositions, aptitudes. In synchronization, individuals with their very own experiences and backgrounds: decisions, even similar, embodied in diverse beings will lead to distinct movements. In solo contexts, unique characters, sometimes tragically alone, whose stories and adventures are incomparable, admirable and transposable. Whose trajectories might be parallel to mine or yours.

I am grateful I also got to use self-teaching as my compass to navigate this space—and created a self-understanding and development tool out of my practice wandering around that Yin-Yang complex. I believe this is very fortunate and I feel like I have an opportunity—maybe a responsibility—to try and have this idea “mirror” on a collective scale.

I(‘)m-possible

No, of course not: I do not think we are going to change the world just by dancing. But we do have the power to transform perceptions, one dance at a time. I do feel like if more people were willing to share space with one another, to actively look and really pay attention to each other, to slow down sometimes, embrace and vibe on the same rhythm, to get rid of perfectionism and fear of failure, of the strict impossibility to reinvent oneself or shift the collective dynamics “just because”, to celebrate together even small individual initiatives, among other things … then there would not be a lot left to save it from. We would also probably get to be better neighbours, friends, coworkers, lovers, brothers and sisters, parents, children, etc.

I was once told that
Maybe
This frantic fantasy of flying
Was symptomatic
Of an impatient Soul.

Now what if Gravity was only a safeguard,
To prevent men from escaping
To the sky?

As Tuck and Yang note, decolonization is not a metaphor. This term knows extensions though, that go past—without excluding—the idea of returning land to indigenous peoples. Of course, the risk of letting substance be taken away with overuse—and misuse—of a term always exists in any situation and context: such is the point the authors of this article are making. But colonization also extends to the mind and involves conditioning mechanisms that perpetuate subordination systems. Colonization did not only marginalise and exclude by exploiting people, land and resources but also voices, ideas, values and systems. It goes beyond the question of the land and there is no metaphor in stating that: it is only broad vision. Decolonizing thus means and implies to re-think, re-wire our socially constructed ways, modes of interaction, visions, perceptions and behaviors we were brought to the World with under settler colonialism. As stated by Olga Lucía Sorzano, “decoloniality […] advocates for the need to understand and to approach the world from diverse perspectives” (49).

Now to close the loop and go back to Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández’s call to “the challenge [and] the opportunity of actively rethinking modes for human interaction” (42) in this present era of global mobilizations, I would like to close this essay considering our possible bias.

There exists a lot of places where Circus and Dance already “do well” when it comes to decolonizing. Circus is playful. Childish. Authority defying, dangerous, as well as challenging conventions and norms. Circus is risk taking. No wonder my mother would ask, “qu’est-que c’est ce Cirque?”/“What is this Circus?” as she entered our messy, unruly room where I was probably jumping on beds with my brother, challenging her very own set of rules—the house rules. Circus breaks the frame, the norms, even the very definition of what is “possible”. It opens doors, ventures outside of the collectively explored area and thus enlarges the spectrum to help re-shape the whole picture.

There also is a whole lot of ways and places where Circus and Dance quite easily comply with, not to say submit to, very colonial values. Of course, getting our work seen implies having to work with partners, funders, governments: a variety of actors that in many ways force us to maintain neutrality, to fall in certain standards—of form/formats, relation to time and calendars, topics, ways of creating, reasons and motives (needs?), ways of presenting/distributing, etc. Beyond questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better, system(at)ic revolution requires us to recognize and acknowledge the places and cases where even we internalized colonization values, ideas and cultures.

If we are going to self-assign, as sometimes we artists do, the role of “de-colonizer” through our practices: to use our Art as a tool to invite audiences to reflect; re-shape our World; re-poetize our perceptions; re-imagine individual and collective existence; challenge patriarchy, capitalism and our “natural” forms of social organization; and “undo[ing] the processes of classification, separation and aestheticization formed under settler colonialism” (Mirzoeff 13), maybe the first few steps to take are ours. Maybe we should start by trying to “decolonize” our practices themselves, as performers. When, for example, are we going to distance ourselves from the exclusive pursuit of “wow”, of unique, of record, of awesome, of incredible, of exploit; to choose sensitive and relatable—not instead of, but also? To invite our peers to reflect and actually give them space for it? With this article—as well as with my personal practice—I try and advocate for a decentering towards poetic, oneiric, allegoric, metaphoric.

I genuinely believe that within reverie and universality—over the drum-rolls and the cult of performance, of freak, of singular—lay a resistance to the global system that was designed by the “Western” World to maintain a dominant position—imposing the intellectual and annihilating the playful (even opposing these two actually is very colonial, no?). This World we live in, and possibly especially as a consequence of such things as colonialism, lacks poetry. It is way too prosaic and does not pursue enough enchantment. Poetry is a way to transform perception and thus to induce change.

Decolonization can be joyful. It is about twisting ways of envisioning and knowing the World, that we believe are exclusive because of conditioning, of imposed dominating ways. It is about restructuring or offering alternative ways not only of moving but also of (day-)dreaming. How about we write it down on the cover of our notebooks, or on sticky notes that would remain next to our screens, until we actually integrate it in our practices and processes?