Embodied performance arts like dance are central to examining questions of decoloniality, given that bodies marked by enslavement, discrimination or occupation can both express and resist these oppressions. Dance becomes a creative practice, and a form of thinking.
Moreover, if colonial ideologies have historically devalued, even eradicated the cultural practices of their colonized subjects, rhythms and movements can be stored in, and replayed by, the performer’s body. Inherited cultural practices like dance can thus re-enact past histories. Dance becomes a system of learning, storing, producing and transmitting knowledge: ‘body-thoughts’, to borrow the words of Black British choreographer-performers Alexandrina Hemsley and Seke Chimutengwende (‘The Future Stared Back at Us for the First Time: Black Holes Revisited’. Contemporary Theatre Review, 31. 1–2 (2021), 197–203).
Since 2022 the Goldsmiths Centre for Comparative Literature has hosted a series of talks on postcolonial performance (see the May 2022 and May 2023 series), and this year’s focus is specifically on dance.
We are delighted to welcome academics and performers who will discuss and analyse the theme of postcolonial dance from geographical areas which, while varied, share a common interest in resistance to oppression and/or occupation; the revival of indigenous or inherited practices; and the interrogation of fluid identities in a postcolonial world. These areas are Africa, South Asia, Latin America and Palestine.
All talks are online.
13 May 2025, 6pm BST: Jeleel Ojuade (Ojaja University, Nigeria), ‘Reclaiming Dance in Africa: Ancestral Heritage and Political Agency’. Chaired by Sola Adeyemi (University of East Anglia, UK).
This paper explores the evolution and significance of dance as a critical postcolonial tool in Africa, highlighting its role in reclaiming cultural identity, resisting colonial narratives, and promoting national consciousness. Postcolonial dance in Africa is not merely an artistic expression; it is a powerful site of memory, resistance, and sociopolitical commentary. Drawing from both traditional and contemporary practices, African choreographers have reimagined movement vocabularies to interrogate histories of subjugation, celebrate indigenous heritage, and respond to modern realities…. Read more and register to attend.
20 May 2025, 3 pm BST: Brahma Prakash, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, ‘A Manifesto to Decolonize Dance and Movement Discourses in South Asia’. Chaired by Royona Mitra (Brunel University, UK)
Dance has to be a movement.
Movements have to have dance.
These are two fundamental propositions – call them slogans – on which I speculate on the questions of dance, movement, performance and resistance discourses in India. My evocations of dance and movements attempt to read them beyond their specific bodies and locations, in larger connections and associations in which they are formed or they (dis)appear. ‘Dance has to be a movement’ is a basic premise on which I think around the questions of decolonization and De-Brahmanization of dance discourses. Likewise, a ‘movement’ here connotes both the bodily movement (from the movement of dancers to the movements of migrant labourers) as well as social and political movements that shape our understanding of body and aesthetics…. Read more and register to attend.
27 May 2025, 6pm BST: María Regina Firmino-Castillo, University of California, Riverside, USA,’“Dancing the Pluriverse” redux: (Indigenous) Performance as ontological praxis or anticolonial poiesis?’. Chaired by Maria Estrada Fuentes (Royal Holloway University of London, UK).
Critically revisiting my 2016 article “Dancing the Pluriverse: Indigenous Performance as Ontological Praxis,” I engage with the article’s afterlives and exercise epistemological responsibility for its unintended consequences. Two interrelated phenomena compel this auto-critique: the incomplete turn toward decoloniality in dance and performance studies, and a postcoloniality that remains deferred through the near-global normalization of colonial violence, extractivism, and genocide as status-quo. Concerned that the original claims in “Dancing the Pluriverse” may inadvertently legitimize onto-epistemic extractivism masked as decolonizing practice, I revise the article’s key concepts—ontological praxis, pluriversality, telluric relationality, and complex Indigeneity…. Read more and register to attend.
3 June 2025, 6pm BST: ‘Performance, Memory, and Resistance: A Talk by Palestinian Performance Artist Riham Isaac,’ (University of Exeter, UK), Chaired by Manal Massalha (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK).
In this artist talk, multidisciplinary performance maker Riham Isaac reflects on the role of performance in shaping collective memory, reclaiming narratives and spaces, and imagining freedom under conditions of occupation. Drawing on works such as Another Lover’s Discourse (2023), Stone and Road (2014), and her performance-based workshops in public spaces, Isaac explores how performance becomes a space for poetic disruption, embodied resistance, and community-based storytelling. From the streets of Ramallah to stages across Europe, with personal stories rooted in her hometown of Beit Sahour and a broader exploration into land and archival memory, this talk invites us to consider how performance can serve both as an active agent and as an urgent response to ongoing colonial violence—a radical act of liberation in the face of colonial systems…. Read more and register to attend.
