Performing Gender: Dancing In Your Shoes is a three-year audience development project aimed at developing a bond between cultural professionals and their local communities in the field of dance and performing arts through a discussion on gender and LGBTQI+ identities.
The project explores Dance as a medium to deepen understanding of questions around gender and sexual identity, and the project partners have worked in collaboration with a range of communities often marginalised in contemporary culture: these include communities with experience of gender-based violence, sexual discrimination, racism, homophobia and transphobia, and the ageing body.
Performing Gender: Dancing In Your Shoes presents three lectures by artists exploring the intersection of dance practice, and questions of gender, sexuality and marginalised communities.
How do artists navigate the relationship between their personal identity (and identities) and their artistic practice? Is identity-based practice necessarily activist practice? How do artists choose to employ, subvert or reject the categories placed upon them by wider society – including by the cultural sector?
The provocations will be delivered in English with live captioning.
Artists taking part in the livestream
Bakani Pick-Up
Bakani is a choreographer, movement artist and improvisation practitioner. As well as creating their own work, they have performed nationally and internationally in works by Theo Clinkard, Anthea Hamilton and Fevered Sleep. With practice as research at the core of their work, they explore decolonisation through dance practice, haptic visuality and choreographic research. Bakani is the Artistic Director of Bakani Pick-Up Company. Bakani is based in Leeds, England.
Marina Santo
Born in Río de Janeiro and resident in Madrid, Spain, since 2006 Marina has been a dance teacher and Body Intelligence researcher. Since 2010 she has been creating projects focusing on communities and in this capacity has collaborated with entities and institutions in Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador and the UK. She devotes an important part of her ongoing teaching work to spaces for women, such as Entre Dos and the Espacio de Igualdad Lucrecia Pérez. She also participates as a guest teacher in the projects for racialised communities that take place in the Centro de Residencias Artísticas at Matadero, Madrid (Laboratorio Bachata, Quilombo Nimba Fest).
Themes and Provocations
Commissioned by the British Council, the following films explore some of the key themes and artistic practices of the project, as well as ways that artists and arts organisations have collaborated with local cultural policymakers and communities to build projects with deep and lasting impact.
More information
Performing Gender has been a series of Creative Europe-supported collaborative projects using the Performing Arts and Dance in particular to deepen understanding of questions around gender and sexual identity. The results have included greater innovation from artists, strengthened communities and excellent dance works.
The 2020–23 edition, Dancing In Your Shoes, has explored how artistic processes can support community-building through genuine co-design between professional artists and target community members. The project has also shown that deep engagement with communities does not have to result in cultural works that are somehow ‘less valuable’ or ‘less professional’ than works authored by isolated choreographers. In fact, the project has shown that rigorous, innovative and excellent works can result from this deep collaborative practice.
Dancing In Your Shoes, has encouraged Dance as a cultural vehicle for encouraging and amplifying community voices. So many of the communities they have worked with carry their lived experience of marginalisation in their bodies – through gender-based violence, through sexual discrimination, through experiences of racism, homophobia or transphobia, through the aging body, or through disability. Dance, if explored with sensitivity and experience, has the power to transform individual experience and to build communities.
Event: 14 November 2023 Brussels, Belgium and online
Find more information here
