On the re-appearance of ancestral forms of movement

Choreographer Amanda Piña will take over the Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship at Freie Universität Berlin in the summer semester of 2024. The internationally renowned dance artist will present her artistic work in two public events at the Akademie der Künste to accompany her guest professorship. On  the opening event at Akademie der Künste on April 17, Amanda Piña will speak about her  long- term artistic research titled Endangered Human Movements*  which deals with the re- appearance of ancestral forms of movement. This re- appearance is understood as a way of knowing through embodiment and metamorphosis, as a form of re-existence and as another episteme of art, dance and performance. 

 *Endangered Human Movements is the title of a long-term project, initiated in the year 2014, focusing on the re-appearance of ancestral  human (and non-human), movement practices. Within  this frame, a series of performances, workshops, films, installations, talks, publications and a comprehensive online archive are developed, in which ancestral embodied practices -movements, dances and forms of world-making – re-appear in the context of the theatre, the museum and beyond. The artistic research practice entails a movement towards understanding the implications of the narratives of modernity still present in arts and culture by introducing critical perspectives from the fields of anthropology,  decolonial theory and  contemporary Amerindian and Afro-diasporic knowledge traditions as present in Abya Yala, (the American continent), the latter encompassing not only contemporary shamanic practices but also orally transmitted knowledge, social knowledge about the body, about dance, movement and touch, about healing, about plants, about perception, about the interconnectedness of life forms and about ritual diplomatic knowledge applied to the relationships with other beings.

The event will be held in English, admission is free and interested members of the public are cordially invited.