CÍRCULOS

THE NOTHING

“We don't have to discover our bodies, but we do have to recognize them. Whether big or small, the ass was always there. We have to recognize our own geographies, our reliefs. Since when the caravels arrived, the people and their cultures were already there, there was no need to discover them. Just because someone doesn't know something, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist”
Kebra (2021a)

“They don't say what they saw, but they say that they can't say it. Those things that cannot be said, it is necessary to at least say that they cannot be said, so that it is understood that silence is not about not having anything to say, but rather that there is no room in the voices for how much there is to say”
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Answer from Sor Juana to Sor Filotea (1961)

I started writing this from a place that is very much not rational, very much not words. A place that I encountered one day while dancing in the middle of a circle, at the top of a hill, after a long time chasing it, making it up. This place is the notion that Nothing is present everywhere and in everything; that we can speak with it, into it.
What I want to convey here is intangible.
Its edges softly brush up against Nothing.

This silence showed me the potential of failure once I brushed up against it that night at the top of October 12th, in Medellín, Colombia.
So,there we were,
in their neighborhood,
dancing in the square in tight circles.
Speaking into them, screaming into them.

This research focuses on tracing ideology in my body considering one of the intersections I live in, being a woman, European and white,
with the need to contribute to the search for emancipation.
I believe in the revolution, and I believe in the revolution being channeled through the body because I can feel it slowly taking over my insides. This is an exploration of what the possibilities of bodies are for minds, as well as how minds have allowed or restricted bodies from moving; realizing we repeat patterns again and again, and that we do it in unison, but also realizing that we break patterns again and again, and that we do that in unison as well.

Ideology changes the way we move, the space we occupy and how. With this research I gather knowledge from a few dance practices that challenge the place that the society I was born into has given to the body. These dances have in common the creation of circles in the body (grinding, wining, perreando) and outside the body (cyphers, corrillos). They help me find,
1. an escape
2. the beginning of a solution to the apathy that has taken over
my body and the bodies around me

This could have happened in so many other ways,
but I happened to stumble over the hips.

STRATEGIES

"Me quiere hacer pensar
Que soy parte de una trilogía racial
Donde tol mundo es igual,
sin trato especial
Sé perdonar
Eres tú el que no sabe disculpar"

Loiza - Tego Calderón

As a white body, one of the underlying ambitions of this research is to have a better understanding of what being white means. Is it skin color? Is it also the environment you are born in? The people around you? The passport you hold? How you deal with belonging? Being white is crossed by other intersections that combine endlessly. For example, it is not the same in my body, as a middle-class student in the Netherlands raised in Madrid, as in the body of a Moldovan strawberry picker working in Andalucía (Álvarez, 2024) or an Israeli small business owner (Marsi and Mohamed, 2024).

Menakem (2017) asks what happens to people who have experienced (or whose ancestors have experienced) centuries of enslavement and genocide (p.45). A complementary question would be what happens to the group of people that has executed (or whose ancestors have executed) such violence for centuries. I take as the beginning of this exploration that whatever white bodies have done to others, they have done to each other before (Menakem, 2017, p.xxi). To open a window in the seemingly invulnerable white body, to investigate it without assuming it fragile.

For the purpose of this text, I will speak of whiteness as an ideology that is present in the body, embodied, and reproduced through action. Whiteness as something learnt through rehearsal that requires numb bodies to function; bodies that are desensitized and dissociated enough to reproduce certain ‘structures of feeling’ (Wekker, 2016, p.30) with carefully directed affective capacity. A massive choreography in the size and precision of its execution, as well as in the need for individual efforts to collaborate as one. With this I mean that racial justice is not simply limited to awareness of a nation’s past or a family’s history, or to a list of privileges one might derive from this world order. But that it is also about an honest everyday presence in the body to which we are individually accountable.

Since I started dealing with this topic, I realized that it is often hard to get an imaginative or personal reflection about whiteness from white people. I think that this dissociation, this lack of words and imaginative understanding is reflected in culture as well. Part of this research is speaking an alternative to this invisibilization of ‘white’ as a racial category by white people, a different way of inhabiting the collective white body,
starting by bothering it,
by waking it up.
And eventually speculating about its imaginary.

Extracts from Watch Your Body, an investigation conducted in 2023 in collaboration with Kunstinstituut Melly. I interviewed 8 white(-passing) people working in cultural institutions in Rotterdam about what it means to be white. The interviews recorded the body language of the participants and focused on this material in the analysis of the conversations.

For this disruption, my main tool is a movement/dance practice that draws on body material from different sources: perreo, flamenco and hiphop. I will not be able to go in depth with each of them, but it is important to note that their development, though differing from one another, is the result of resistance movements and pleasure practices, forced migration and slavery, state repression and state appropriation, the mainstream and the underground. They remember the past, deal with the present and speculate about the future.

Apart from being part of my life in different ways, there are more concrete reasons why I use these dances specifically. First, improvisation in groups set up in circles or half-circles have been fundamental in the development of these dances. STRAIGHT OFF THE DOME builds on knowledge of what in hiphop is called a cypher (a circle that people dance inside of) to explain what happens inside. The section develops on their potential to redefine failure and fragility, helping us recover trust in our bodies.

Second, in the cases of flamenco and perreo, they have been important in the construction of my identity, but also in the state identity of Spain, where I grew up. A state identity that is as much a conceptual fiction as an enacted reality. The transformations of these dances owe a lot to Spain’s colonial history, a 40-year-long Catholic dictatorship and its transition to a neoliberal socioeconomic system after. To show this, POSTURAL CONTROL explains some of the social dynamics around these dances: their arrivals, their transformations, and their capacity for survival.
Finally, flamenco and perreo share the characteristic of being (or having elements of, in the case of tangos trianeros in flamenco) what Dr. Fannie Sosa, sacral dance scholar, calls sacral dances:

“Sacral dances are usually used to talk about sacreddances. But I use it to talk about dances that move the sacral area of the body, the sacrum. Dances that unite sacrilegious and the sacred. They move the belly, the hips, and they do so in a pleasurable way. Differently from a lot of Western traditions where it's a lot about mind over matter and elevating over the pain and discipline, like ballet; a lot of African or Black diasporic dance traditions are really not about mind over matter, they're about the matter.” (Sosa, 00:52)
the matterThe Matterthe matter
The Matter
The Matter

Therefore, dances that move the sacrum are a form of resistance through pleasure. This is further developed in CULEANDO AL SISTEMA: the division between sin and virtue, reason and emotion, body and mind; and the connection of their dissolution to the movement of the sacrum.

Finally, I ask who this narrative serves. My conclusion is that white people in Europe not moving our hips is a result of the stigma created to excuse the exploitation of bodies. It is a result of repressed sexuality, of what religion has done to our bodies, of judgment and sin.

The only solution I see going forward is to dive headfirst into our own failure.

STRAIGHT OFF THE DOME

“I’m always looking for a different space, to get away from a reality. I am always looking for a state. I start with the chemistry of the body: generating tiredness, exhaustion, to generate hormones that take you out of pain... But after that there are other places that we are talking about, like divinity, which for me is beauty. It has nothing to do with aesthetics, which are states of connection… Well, those things that cannot be told. But that divine place is what I always look for. What happens when inspiration goes away, when energy runs out?”
Rocío Molina in Encuentros Canal Sur (canalsur, 2022)

“It’s about completion of thought and a circle of unity. And the circle is infinity. The circle is always going, always going, always going, and when everyone is focused on what they are supposed to be focused on it’s like next level spirituality.”
Toni Blackman in Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme (26:00, 2018)

My definition of a dance cypher comes from hip-hop culture: a gathering of dancers who create a circle to freestyle inside of. The people creating the edge of the circle get close together to delimit the space and direct their attention to the inside. That space can be occupied alone or in company, creating a dialogue between the bodies through beatboxing, rapping or (break)dancing.

Cyphers are not about success. At least not in the way I learn it. ‘Success’ is a stiff and fragile concept. I feel a revolution in failing in front of other people and feeling very clearly inside myself that the exposure is okay. The failure will provide for me to the extent to which I have come to terms with myself, and days after I can still feel it running through my body.

Success as I learnt it implies to be known; to contain my anger, because it’s ugly, and to be strong in my containment. But what can I do if I feel emotions,
if I am not perfect*,
if I sometimes need to crumble?
Cyphers help me bend the idea of success and keep it helpful,
because the moment I make it the objective truth that I have been told it is,
I start drowning in it.

*Quoting Samantha Hudson, “being perfect is hard, but you get used to it”.

Instagram post by @badbixsamantha

Cypher from the documentary Check your body at the door(2011)

Cyphers are social spaces. I have used them to watch and learn, to practice new steps or to overcome performance anxiety. Therefore, at their best I see them as pedagogic spaces to strengthen community ties, with huge capacity to positively affect minds and bodies, as they “continually reconfigure ideas of failure and mistake” (Watkins and Caines, 2014). I see how cyphers help me flexibilize my judgement, putting failure into perspective by allowing it to take place.
They do something humbling to the ego.
The catharsis that can be experienced inside one can only be described as spiritual. Knowing that I am surrounded and voluntarily giving up a certain Gaze over my body, giving way to a new Gaze that holds the space together.
It is a decision whose vision I trust and who my allies are.

I gather the courage and step in.
Once inside, I remind myself again and again not to think about the eyes
that are my eyes.
Body before mind,
straight off the dome.

Girls Cypher in Medellín, Colombia (2023). Posted by @isabelboenders.

“The whole circumference is a protection, at the same time it’s an expression, so the circle is there, and it seems to be almost claustrophobic, but everyone is free and they want to be tight like that, together like that”
Abiodun Oyowele in Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme (2018, 15:06)

“Freestyle, where you just respond to the impulse has to be the most spiritual act, right? Cause you got no idea what you’re gonna say next. Because it comes from something that is not directed. This is what most of our creative expression does. It’s so spiritual we don’t need a book; we don’t need an explanation.”
Eluard Burt II in Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme (2018, 05:46)

POSTURAL CONTROL

De Despeñaperros abajo
Llegaron los españoles
A coger Andalucías
Como caracoles

ANDALUÇÊ YORÁ {HIEROFONÍA DE LOS MORISCOS Y EL GRAN EXPOLIO} – Califato 3/4

The documentary Triana pura y pura (2013) shows and contextualizes the recordings of the massive flamenco gathering that took place in 1983 at Teatro Lope de Vega in Sevilla, Spain. After the initiative of Gloria Filigrana, the biggest Roma families of Triana came together to remember the land from which they were ousted in the 50s. A tradition of baile, cante and toque flows through the bodies of the community’s elders, reunited after a long time apart.

Tablao flamenco at Teatro Lope de Vega (1983).
El Titi and Pepa La Calzona dance.

The roots of the Roma people are still a topic of discussion. It is a migratory movement that most likely came from North-East India, in the Punjab region, and left around the year 1000 to start a route through the Middle East and the European continent. They have been present in the Iberian Peninsula since the 16th century. (Filigrana, 2020, p.22). It is therefore understood as an ethnic group with linguistic and cultural affinity.

In minute 52:49 of the documentary, we see Pastora and Tío Juani dance a tango trianero where the hips take centre stage. The video is a testimony of the presence of erotism in flamenco, as well as of its absence now. As Ricardo Pachón explains,

“Something very important in the elders of Triana is the wild erotism that flamenco had. Let’s not forget that a little bit more than a century ago the zarabanda was prohibited under penalty of exile and lashing. Erotism was an important component of the dance* (…) So these elders who have no shame to manifest themselves will simulate a sex with their pants and do a series of traditions that have no malice and that reveal that the dance had an erotic component that now has completely disappeared” (51:12).

In the quote above, Pachón makes a point about the historical projection of evil on the bodies of Roma women, as we can see in this invitation from 1781. “El demonio vive en el cuerpo de las gitanas y se despierta con la zarabanda”[Satan lives in the body of gitanas and is awakened with the Zarabanda ]. Meaning that there is something essentially sinful in the bodies of these women that is awakened through erotism.

Neighborhood party in Córdoba, Medellín (2023)

Two points come to mind from this quote. First, that the ties between erotism and sin are clearly influenced by the long-standing presence of Christianism in Spain. Second, that this position that the body of Roma women is put into in 1781 is a recurrent racist strategy of othering by associating a part of society with The Abject.

When I first watched the footage, I could not stop thinking how similar the tango is to perreo. Perrear refers to dancing like dogs fucking. It focuses on the movement of the hips and chest with gyrating and shaking movements. The dance is directly connected to reggaeton music, which originated in Panama and Puerto Rico in the 90s.

“Reggaeton is a music that was born in the city. The great influence of la bomba, of la plena. Soca, which began as a way to modernize calypso. The craze for hip hop in that decade (partly a consequence of Jamaican dancehall, in turn a mutation of reggae) and its ability to summon radically personal forms of expression. The relationship with salsa. The need to create music based on one's own experience and identity in the context of Latin American cities. The possibility of rapping in Spanish. The importance of trance and rhythm constantly present from Africa (what we tend to call “monotony”). And then the raids. The first thing that stands out when investigating the roots of the genre is that it began with opposition from the ones in power.” Elías in Vamos pal Perreo (2020)

Reggaeton has now extended internationally, with the social agreements around perreo transforming with it. Alone, in twos, in threes, rubbing, humping, wining slow, pushing, receiving…
Often in circles.

Flamencas dancing dressed with ‘puchos’, dress imposed by the dictatorship

In Spain perreo is often read uniquely as a dance that implies sexual desire. In practice this translates into violence on anyone who wants to move their ass for play, pleasure or skill. It becomes reductive of the cultural weight of the dance, constricting the body to avoid harassment or ostracism. It is often queer and non-white spaces that offer an escape to this constriction (i.e. La Bellaquera or Deprerreo in Barcelona).

I think that this repression has a lot to do with Spain being a European country that only in 1978 started to transition out of a Catholic fascist dictatorship (1936-1978) and into a neoliberal parliamentary monarchy. The influence of a Catholic and fascist education takes longer to disappear than a few decades. A Catholic and fascist education with the mission of preserving state unity, meaning that it definitely did not consider reeducating on its history. As Pachón points out, it was the dictatorship, through its female education force (Sección Femenina) that erased the erotic component of flamenco by constricting the dancers into specific clothing (Pachón, 52:05). An authoritarian gaze infiltrated the dance.

This shift of values is a movement also reflected in dance. When it comes to the development of flamenco since the 1990s, López Rodríguez (2020) brings up “the imprint that ballet aesthetics had to have on flamenco, given its markedly formalist character that reinforced the ideal of homogeneous and stylized bodies capable of creating ‘beautiful figures’” (p.178). A stark contrast with the bodies that we see in the documentary. The homogenization of the form in flamenco thus required a separation, a dissociation from what was central in Triana: The Matter.

Still from video BAILANDO PAIPA - MEDELLIN (2013)

Further, Spain has a strong history of feminist resistance, which has managed to become more integrated in the national discourse with the country’s transition to a neoliberal order. However, this discourse is not intersectional in nature, which can be observed in the shift in the perception of (femme) non-white bodies. While the understanding from 1781 mentioned earlier has changed, the hypersexualization of Roma women reminds of the way Latinas are portrayed now as “exotic and always available for sex” (Kebra, 2015). At the same time, Roma women are seen as “submissive, compliant and sexually inexperienced”, while the predominant values for non-Roma women (payas) in Spanish society currently are “independence, a supposed sexual freedom and lack of subordination to the couple” (Sáez y Vila, 2019, p.46). Values that represent Spain’s transition into a European country.

Therefore, dance aesthetics contain ideology in themselves, and the imposition of an ideology goes through the education of the bodies that uphold it. Once we know this, how do we build a culture that reclaims bodies?

[BODY PALIMPSEST]

Before continuing, a note.

“The body quotes. It quotes the bodies that came before and those that are around. It quotes different aspects of reality, materializes them and gives them a body. That is why performance as an aesthetic strategy can become a space of resistance”
Maite Garbayo Maeztu, 2016, p.35

A palimpsest is something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. While it is often applied to written text, we can also speak of palimpsest in other instances. The idea of a ‘body palimpsest’ is the affirmation that each body houses a different set of histories. Menakem (2018) mentions that “our very bodies house the unhealed dissonance and trauma of our ancestors” (p.33). Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands (2018) focuses on racialized trauma and its presence in our bodies. It was the first time I read about how to intimately approach racism as a white person. It showed me how to start the process of identifying whiteness in my body, shaking the sleep away from what until then seemed just a theoretical category. The moment I started to racialize my experience of life coincides with a new turn in the understanding of my body. I started to observe how it occupied space: when it was standing open, when it slouched and closed up, what it avoided and got close to. I also started to observe the bodies around me. When did you realize that you are white?
How many times have you been the only white person in the room?
What did that do to your body?
Which knowledge do you take seriously and which do you intuitively discard?
These questions made me very aware of my body, awkward. Especially in the beginning it was very painful to accept that there were things that I simply could not understand. It was like the apathy that would usually shelter my heart deactivated, and suddenly I was on edge… And, of course, guilt made an appearance. Guilt has often been a safety mechanism for me to not deal with confrontation, to protect me from action. I have learnt to understand it as a symptom, a flashing red sign that says DANGER, DON’T BE FOOLED. Guilt is uncomfortable, but to reveal what it hides it needs to be broken.

This discomfort made me wonder about my own body palimpsest: that which has not been dealt with and the techniques employed to avoid dealing with it. Taking bodies seriously helped me make active a sense of injustice, to transition from sadness to anger, and from passivity to action.

CULEANDO AL SISTEMA

I may be goofy, may be sexy, but I’m not a joke
Arugula – Junglepussy

Ehta tía ehtá cabreá dehde la Santa Çena,
poné a tor mundo deresho,
me tenéi el coño com-una verbena
DE LA FRONTERA – Califato ¾, Carmen Xía, Abocajarro

Cuando perreo tiembla la tierra
Muerto Matao - Eurowitch

Desculonización is a project initiated by Kebra in 2015 in Mexico DF. Kebra is a visual artist, DJ and performer from Brasil, currently based in Mexico. The word is a combination of descolonizar (decolonize) and culo (ass). The project desfines itself as “contra-colonial, with the mission of perturbing thoughts, corporalities and affects through dance, music and sweat”.

Performance by Desculonización at Anahuacalli, Mexico DF (2023)

“Desculonización is a practice, a process, and not an end in itself. The hips, ligaments, muscles, fat, guts and viscera are used to begin mapping and feeling the journey, activating the memory. This technique inhabits an order of knowledge that is transmitted through the body, as Taísa Machado, creator of Afrofunk Rio, says, it is “A ciência do Rebolado”. It is conceiving that the body has its own writing, an incorporated writing, its universes, its memories. This has been done and continues to be done by predominantly gestural and oral cultures such as indigenous and African cultures, which has constituted an intangible heritage.”

Here again we find the idea of memory being activated through the body. The body containing an order of knowledge, an epistemology. While she conceives the body as speaking its own tongue, she constantly names and makes body parts appear that are often considered too impure to be related to humans.

Flyer of a Desculonización x Suculenta party in Mexico DF (2023)

hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera hips ligaments fat guts viscera

These are body parts not only stored physically inside our bodies but also culturally hidden. The language that Kebra uses to describe this knowledge becomes both poetic and very real. I think that this approach makes her method mundanely spiritual, or spiritually mundane, making a point of the colonial division reason-emotion, terrenal-spiritual, by erasing it. It is in this crossing where she proposes to search for resistance to the disciplination of bodies:

Workshop by Desculonización in Mexico DF (2023)

“To understand the ass and the anus as parts of the body that have been hypersexualized, racialized and discriminated against; of the exoticization that has been done abroad, of the idealization of the Latin woman always available for sex; racism against black women (who was the matrix carrier of that knowledge that we call perreo and that today is part of the identity of an entire generation).”

Desculonización proposes shaking the sacrum as a way of decolonizing the body. The body is colonized when it represses itself (its movement, its sexuality, its voice, ITS PLEASURE) for the service of another (Kebra, 2015). This repression also concerns spaces of leisure and enjoyment that do not have a productive value. As Filigrana (2020), explains:

“One of the victories of the current socio-economic system is to have made believe that the only concept of work is that which sells the workforce in exchange for a salary, only this one is recognized as productive. Any other activity that is outside of the work-wage blackmail is invisibilized, not recognized or undervalued” (p.28)

Restricting dancing from the hips to one part of life is a matter of ideology, not an objective truth. I shake my ass when I’m angry, stepping strong on the floor and letting the fat loose, tightening my face. I contract my ass cheeks to play around with my bounce abilities when I’m bored. I wine slow when I’m feeling sad, but also when I’m feeling sexy. I want to be able to control my hips the same way I have learnt to write with my hands; to break with the years of channeling from my head instead of my ass.

Hips literacy.

I want to be ugly.

I want to shake until something breaks or lights up on fire.

Exercise: stand up and start a soft shake from your chest. Increase that shake until it takes over your whole body, letting your weight drop to the floor. Focus the shake on one body part while the rest of the body rests. Shake it soft and then hard. Now move the shake to your ass. Shake it soft and then hard.

While we have learnt to process information through our head and communicate it through our mouths, our anus and mouth are also physically connected. So, could shaking our ass help us get out of our head?

“Pat your pussy like you no care, then flick your lighter in the air”
Mi Nuh Care – Junglepussy

GOING FORWARD,
A NEW IMAGINARY