About the work

The project for expanding dance was born from a pressing urgency to question the uses, practicalities, advantages and potencialities dance can have in our ways of living. I came in contact with dance very young and right from the beggining dance became a journey to explore the many ways in which I could decide to engage with other people, with my surroundings, with other sentient beings, materials, concepts, intentions. Dance, for me, enabled an almost magical space where the experimentation and expansion of my bodily capacities were always in relation to something other. In simple words, dancing was about relating, and for a seven year old kid, it was about inventing alternative ways of relating through dancing. I recognize now the priviledge I had in encountering dance as a life practice from such a young age, because life —as I grew older— became more challenging and violent than I could ever imagine.

Growing up in a country where violence is the most intimate commonality, I developed strategies of behaviour in relation to violence that as person determined and influenced my position in the world. Distrust, defensiveness, and vigilance were strong markers for my social behaviour in public space, my body grew closed. Racism, patriarchy, classicim and other prejudicial mindsets were all around pusing their views onto me, imposing a clear dichotomy between what is right and wrong, what one should do, how one should behave; my body was tamed. Within this violent structures I started ‘forming’ my body in the practice of institutional dance, more specifically, classical ballet. I came to believe that whatever views the institution proposed I had to blindly follow, even when that meant almost entirely to reject the wildness of my movement and consequenctially of myself. When I was finishing the 7th grade of the National School of Ballet in Cuba —fiveteen— depressed, languished, shut down, apathetic and praised, I started doubting wether my inclinations to this profession were aligned with the values I cherished about dance when I was younger, before becoming ‘a ballerina’.

However in the practice, in the doing, especially with others, I kept on finding this joy, the activation of our capacities, so I persisted and continued the professional practice of dance in different companies and projects. Inside these collaborative processes I could tell that my internal contradiction between discipline and wldness was shared by many. We all recognized the potency and pleasure of dance as a social practice but we were all trapped inside capitalist preassures to compete, produce, succeed, and master not only our bodies but our lives. But I kept on finding joy so I persisted.

One of the most beautiful things about dance are the moments of transitions, when things change, those liminal moments where a fundamental shift ocurrs. Transitions are not homogenous processes, they have rhythms and cadencies, even if for example one jumps from one place to another there is first a gathering of the body for the impulse, the moment of takeoff, the momentum, gravity and shock of the landing. By taking time to attend to the qualities in the moments of transition, in the conjuction of my body-mind awareness I learned to listen to others move or stand, attending to their timing, their breaths, peeking my nose into possible futures where I could inter-act with them. In simple words, I learned to play.

Expanding dance is an effort to use the tools that this specific movement practice has in order to allow joyfull activations. Within this project I conceived a series of strategies to hold a space —physical, metaphorical, poetic, imaginative— where to expand and explore our relational capacities.