The Curators’ Invitation
Hospitalities - Every invitation implies an act of hospitality. The Latin origins of this word – hostis – offer an interesting ambiguity as it can mean either ‘hosting’ and ‘being hosted’. This word also shares roots with ‘enemy’ and equally, in its more ancient Indo-European origins, with ‘stranger’. It is precisely here, at the very heart of this conflicted polysemy that we, artists and curators of the FORUM, place our invitation: if we were to imagine a form of hospitality that implies a simultaneous hosting and being hosted, what would this double posture enable? Or demand? What modes of responsibility, of accountability, would this require to be able to embrace the strange/r, the foreign/er, the unfamiliar?
Idio Chichava’s Invitation, Mozambique
M’POLO: Rituals of the Living Body
M’POLO: Rituals of the Living Body invites a collective experience where the body becomes a space of initiation, sharing, and reinvention. Inspired by Mozambican rites of passage, this is an invitation for everyone to engage in singing, dancing, and storytelling, shaping a living energetic environment, a connected being with others, pointing to the importance of creating together spaces of belonging and celebration through bodily presence.
Original Bomber Crew’s Invitation, Brazil
Fear, Dance and Everything in-between
Bomber Crew is not a dance collective, rather an event in the Brazilian performing arts landscape. In a country sitting between desert and sacred waters, where so much is about survival, they turn the real urban life into an artform. Men taken for boys, men who lost other men to violence and addiction, men who walk around scared, knowing they are the ones, the black, or almost black ones, whom others fear. Bomber is a crew of dancers, musicians, visual artists like no other. They are not your usual Brazilian postcard, nor the nice show festivals like so much. Bomber Crew hits you in the face and leave.
devynn emory’s Invitation, USA
Land somatics
As an antidote to the durational global crisis of humanity, devynn emory - practicing registered nurse, a prescribing psychiatrist, a multi licensed massage therapist, healer, seer, educator and choreographer – will guide the reattunement of our neuropathways through a guided somatic practice honouring the 7 directions of a medicine wheel. The resulting new internal topography will gradually create a map to navigate the unpredictable and chaotic.
Marrugeku’s Invitation, Australia
Dance, Climate and Contested Land
Marrugeku’s offering investigates climate justice on contested lands as the accumulation of colonial histories fuelling accelerated futures. The program of talks and practice sharing will unpack new /old aesthetics that can emerge out of urgent and insurgent reciprocities between dance and the land that is danced on, including the changing weather patterns it occurs within. Marrugeku’s methodologies that arise out of the meeting of diverse Indigenous and settler artists in colonial aftermaths will be introduced to address European contexts to support choreographic truth telling and enable the capacities of dance as an art form to make visible alternative futures.
Fangas Nayaw’s Invitation, Taiwan
Punk! Indigenous futurism with/out ancestors
Located in the Asia-Pacific archipelago, Taiwan is an island country comprised of many First Nations Peoples’ traditional lands. Always was and always will be. Amis-Nation artist and choreographer Fangas Nayaw looks at what makes tradition traditional in the context of futurist speculation while rethinking what it might (not) mean to contemporise the traditional dance and movements of Amis Peoples. With this daring proposal, the artist questions the extinction of Indigenous Peoples’ culture and the representation of cultural preservation. In various contexts where Indigenous cultural symbols are invoked, our Indigeneity becomes hidden beneath layers of stereotypes. Yet this hidden and invisible color is not the black or white of day and night — it is green: vivid, life-giving, and rooted in the earth.