Conflicted Embodiment: Dancing Trans-Atlantic Migrant Dances

Conflicted Embodiment develops an analytical and compositional tool for dance and performance practitioners by engaging with the persistent tensions of translations and the mash up of different dance traditions as a research field. Situated within dance studies, choreography, and dance education, this artistic research contributes to a decolonial critique of the contemporary European/Western dance field. 

The project focuses on the figure of the migrant dance practitioner, who, upon entering the European dance performance field, finds that their dance practice is a site of complex historical and colonial encounters among dance practices, epistemologies, economies, politics, and canons. 

Conflicted Embodiment shifts the focus from the conflict between embodiments and their contexts and suggests that embodiments themselves are already conflicted, trans-individual sites. This relational research offers critical practices and methodologies grounded in collaborative dialogues and local exchanges. 

This doctoral project advocates for a sensitive, embodied, and fleshy approach to the social, historical, and political global inequalities that migration entails through dance. The project aims to offer an approach to otherness by engaging in the struggle for a voice and seeks to provide dancers with a vocabulary that treats friction as a generative source. // Research questions: What conflicts arise within a body that embodies the migrant experience? How does the dancing of a migrating body hold the antagonisms it encounters? How can the notion and practices of Conflicted Embodiment highlight, question, and resist colonial history?

The artistic research consists of three main practices that interact and contribute to each other: dancing, writing, and teaching. The dancing practice rehearses and performs dances of Abya Yala (“The Americas”) and dances from the Western canon, such as ballet and modern dance. The educational practice proposes workshops and mini-festivals as sites for dialogue and support within the migrant community, as well as rehearsal sites for conflicted embodiments in dance education institutions. The historical, documentary, and critical writing practice produces text-based publications that contribute to the critique and dissemination of this research. The research aims to empower the migrant performing arts community by creating a space for encounters where embodiments of dance practices are addressed as a political process. Conflicted Embodiment thus contributes to a decolonial destabilization of Eurocentric dance education.

// a.pass, Research Center Cycle IV, Brussels, Belgium. // Work Space Brussels, Artist trajectory 2021-2023, Brussels, Belgium // La Poderosa, Barcelona, Spain. // Emma Gioia, PhD at Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille. // HAUT, 2021-2023, Copenhagen, Denmark. // Accelerator // Dansmuseet. // Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro (Escola de Comunicação) // Digital Review, Segunda Cuadernos de Danza, Argentina. // Segunda En Papel Editorial, Argentina. // GEDAL (Grupo de Estudios de Danzas Latinoamericanas), Buenos Aires, Argentina. // Universidad Provincial de Córdoba // Plataforma VA // IUPA, Departamento de Danza, Fiske Menuco // Escuela Experimental de Danzas, Neuquén //

Chrysa Parkinson

Eleonora Fabião

From January 2021 to June 2026

One article published in this frame: Notes on Conflicted Embodiment

Another article: Chasing Dances