Moving Touching Margins

Sasha Portyannikova, Agata Siniarska, Nitsan Margaliot

The research area and discourse of the Touching Margins project were extensively expanded and enriched by the collaboration with TanzArchiv Berlin. The initial connection to Berlin as a cultural hub and as our base allowed us to intensify intercultural dialogue which was previously lacking in the field of dance heritage and archives alongside the dominant and familiar history.

The constellation of our research allowed participants to explore dance heritage or their particular interests independently and later share them with colleagues in a hybrid form of a lecture-workshop/audio play/collective practice in a horizontal manner. Thanks to our diverse group of researchers with roots in Indonesia, Israel, the Ivory Coast, Peru, Poland and Russia, the hypothesis of the incompleteness of the existing dance history canon was confirmed. Across collective practices, we unravelled the abundance of undercurrents and off-beat influences to dance development in the 20th century.

Multiple perspectives from differently overlapping geographical and cultural regions allowed participants to intensify and deepen previous knowledge and experience in the field of decolonial practices. As a result, a more relevant and full, often uncomfortable and complex picture of dance history emerged.