When multiple dances coexist within the same body – research on migration, power and movement

In the project, caterina investigates how dance traditions such as ballet, cumbia, salsa, tango and reguetón coexist within the same body – not as a fusion, but as an ongoing encounter characterised by friction, history and power.

‘I am interested in what happens when different dances do not merge, but continue to speak through the body simultaneously,’ says caterina.

The research takes its starting point in mora jara’s own migration from southern Argentina to Europe. Here, migration is understood as a bodily experience in a geographical journey in which movement, identity and belonging change over time.

The project moves between art market and academia and consists of workshops, choreographic experiments, performative publications and writing. Body functions as a means of expression where knowledge arises.
A central concept in the research is Conflicted Embodiment, which interrogates a body shaped by multiple simultaneous experiences, traditions and systems of norms. A body in which contradictions and tensions are not resolved but kept alive.

‘Dance always carries history. Certain movements and bodies have traditionally been valued more highly than others. I investigate what happens when those systems meet within the same body,’ says caterina.

The project also examines how contemporary dance and classical ballet have been shaped by historical and colonial ideals regarding which bodies and forms of expression are considered legitimate within the field of dance.
One of the key methods in the work is what caterina calls an embodied approach to opacity, drawing on Édouard Glissant’s 1990 concept of the “right to opacity” – the right not to make everything fully visible or comprehensible. Instead of articulating every experience into clear explanations, she explores how bodily knowledge can retain its resistance, its layers and its silences.

The research project offers new perspectives on how artistic research can be conducted through practice, movement and experience. It also introduces new ways of understanding migration, not merely as a geographical displacement, but as something that settles in the dancers’ body and alters how they move, experience and orient themselves in the world.