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Moving through: On Corpoliteracy and Body Knowledges

nur für Incom-Mitglieder

Block Seminar - Dates:

22.05.2026

13.05.2026

20.05.2026

27.05.2026

10.06.2026

01.07.2026

What is a scar if not the memory of a once open wound?

You press your finger between my toes, slide

the soap up the side of my leg, until you reach

the scar with the two holes, where the pins were

inserted twenty years ago.  Leaning back, I

remember how I pulled the pin from the leg, how

in a waist-high cast, I dragged myself

from my room to show my parents what I had done.

Your hand on my scar brings me back to the tub

and I want to ask you:  What do you feel

when you touch me there?  I want you to ask me:

What are you feeling now?  But we do not speak.

You drop the soap in the water and I continue

washing, alone.  Do you know my father would

bathe my feet, as you do, as if it was the most

natural thing.  But up to now, I have allowed

only two pair of hands to touch me there,

to be the salve for what still feels like an open wound.

The skin has healed but the scars grow deeper—

When you touch them what do they tell you about my life?

—Kenny Fries, Body Language

The adage „My body is a temple“ has become incorporated in popular culture, but it is a metaphor from 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, which encourages people to be respectful and caring towards their bodies since the body is a sacred space inhabited by the Holy Spirit. This adage can be found in varying forms in different indigenous cultures around the world, with the common denominator being that body itself is a space of reverence. This can be understood in terms of spirituality, but also importantly in terms of spatiality and performativity. In the course „Moving through: On Corpoliteracy and Body Knowledges“ we will delve into

Body as metaphoric and rhetorical space through which sociopolitical, psychosocial, geopolitical, economic and historical issues are expressed through the performativity of the quotidian. In general reflecting on the body as language.

The embodied nature of space, which is to say the way, through movement, gesticulations, feeling, listening through, observing, we participate in the creating and interpretation of spaces. transforming physical locations into personal experiences.

The body as a site of discourse, wherein questions of gender, culture, politics are constantly negotiated and asserted.

The body as an archive through which historical patterns, traumas, joys and other occurrences are cultivated and preserved.

The body as a physical space itself made up of cells, organs and tissues that connect the inside to the outside like the digestive system or the respiratory tract, inter alia.

The body in relation to the environment, i.e. the body as integral part of nature rather than the othering of nature as opposed to the cultured body.

The body and its extensions, be it in the form of protheses, cosmetic auxiliaries like hair extensions, but also in relation to technologies like the smart phone as extension of the body.

The course is understood as a continuation on the deliberations on Corpoliteracy.

CONTEXT

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.

An Igbo proverb states that when we dance we express who we were, who we are, and who we want to be. Time is compressed and telescoped teleologically to contain and express the past, the present and the future in one fluid kinaesthetic moment.

—Esiaba Irobi, The Philosophy of the Sea.

Corpoliteracy is an effort to contextualize the body as a platform, stage, site and medium of learning, a structure or organ that acquires, stores, and disseminates knowledge. This concept implies that the body, in sync with, but also independent of, the brain, has the potential to memorize and pass on/down acquired knowledge through performativity —the prism of movement, dance, and rhythm.

It is common practice that when the Nguemba people— like many other peoples on the African continent and beyond—dance, they invoke and embody certain totems important to particular families or societies at large.

The elephant, lion, monkey, or snake dances not only mimic typical movements of these animals but also convoke the spirits that connect the human to his/her animal. These dances, which are usually performed in groups, then serve a purpose beyond that of mere entertainment and pleasure: the dances become sites that enliven rituals, spaces of spiritual communication and bonding—the bodies that perform are the tools through or with which the rituals are practiced.

To the accompaniment of ritual music, the movements of the legs, arms, and rest of the body invoke certain spirits, and through repetition and reiteration, a certain degree of automation is achieved. Dance becomes a means through which rituals are expressed—or better still—dance is the ritual. Through dance one can communicate with certain spirits and convoke them for the purposes of worship and appeasement. It is no surprise that in the performativity of dance, more often than not, the dancer is catapulted into a temporary state of ecstasy. The etymological roots of ecstasy are not unimportant: “elation” comes from Old French, estaise (ecstasy, rapture), derived from the Late Latin extasis and the Greek ekstasis (entrancement, astonishment, insanity; any displacement or removal from the proper place). It is this rapture, displacement, and removal from a particular space—in dance, the displacement from one’s own body, the possibility of an out of body state—that becomes very interest- ing: trance as state; transcendence via the exalted state of body and soul when dancing.

Besides the spiritual and ritual aspects of dance, performing has obviously been a way for people to write or encode their own histories. Wars or other challenges faced by a group of people take form as dance moves, or are integrated into costumes and music. Battle techniques, loss of life, or moments of victory are re-performed, passed from one generation to another, as with the Mbaya dance or Capoeira. Group dances often reveal moments of encounter. Encountering of a new religion, for example, can lead to the appropriation of those religious signs, as happened with the appearance of the Catholic cross in the Pépé Kallé and Nyboma dances. Encountering new technologies also gives rise to dance moves: arms open wide can symbolize a plane; or the move in the Pédalé dance in dancers mimic cycling.

There is more work to be done exploring the body’s performative role as in dance with respect to the conservation, portrayal, and dissemination of peoples’ histories and that of places and events—dance as a method of historicity, an alternative writing of history, as historiography. The challenge is to acknowledge dance performance as a medium—in its own right—that can reflect with veracity, authenticity, and actuality historical knowledge claims.

Through dances like the Juba, the Chica, or Calenda, one learns about particular times in history: repressions, racial relations, resistances, resilience, and more. The body of the dancer is the witness. The witness’s narrative—especially when the witness is silent—occurs through performativity. Every perform- ance is to a certain degree a re-experience and re-witnessing, rather than just observation. Through dance the observer becomes witness.

It is this oneness of the observer and observed, inside and out- side, that makes dance as a method and practice particularly interesting at this juncture. In Osho it is said that while the scientist is an observer, the mystic is a witness. The dancer too could be considered a witness in this light: their ability to perform the processuality of making histories, and offer testi- mony, collapses the separation of inside from outside.

Through dance and the accompanying music, socio-political realities are embodied, portrayed, and sometimes even processed psychologically and somatically. During the avian influenza outbreak in West Africa in 2008, DJ Lewis released a popular track in the Ivory Coast called Grippe Aviaire; the dance moves in the music video spread like wild fire among the young and old alike. In nightclubs, offices, public spaces, people dangled their half-raised arms, eyes wide open, evoking movements of chickens with bird flu. Another Ivory Coast artist DJ Zidane, that same year, at the height of maltreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo on the other side of the Atlantic, invented the Guantanamo dance.

Teenagers gathered in public spaces dancing as though hand-cuffed or crippled. Art engulfed sociopolitical reality, histories and knowledges were embodied in dance, as were societal sentiments, traumas, joys, and fears. Dance is not about the individual, but the community—the commons. As Léopold Sédar Senghor—the poet, philosopher, and politician—put it:

“Je pense donc je suis”; écrivait Descartes. ...

Le Negroafricain pourrait dire: “Je sens l’Autre,

je danse l’Autre, donc je suis.” Or danser, c’est créer, surtout si la danse est d’amour. C’est, en tout cas,

le meilleur mode de connaissance.

Senghor points out a few important things here. Dance is about creation and it is about knowledge. But maybe most importantly, dance seems to be about connecting with the other, about communion, a group action. Dance, in all its aforementioned functions, manifests itself most effectively when one “dances the other.” Dance is a social phenomenon. From Agwara dance, Bikutsi, Coupé Décalé, and Zouglou, or circle, contra, or square dances, to street dances like breakdancing in which the crew be- comes a surrogate family, dance reflects sociopolitical realities, current and historical affairs, and needs a community to be lived and experienced. One can find solace in the dance crew, share happiness amongst birds of the same feather. The crew is a place for mentorship, often crucial to community building. Hip hop, dancehall moves, krump, and many other urban forms of dance offer a degree of social dignity to the dancers—not only because they dance well, but because of their affiliation with the crew.

In Dance and Politics, Dana Mills writes about dance as a means of communication and as writing. Her argument can be radically summarized as follows: there are more languages than just verbal; human beings have found manifold ways to communicate with each other; and dance is an embodied language, a form of communication between bodies in motion. As such, the language of dance adheres to different rules and structures than those of verbal language. Dance is the way those subjects perform their equality before those expressing them- selves verbally. There are clashes between verbal and nonver- bal languages. At the meeting point between dance and verbal languages, different symbolic and political frameworks collide, underscoring the presence of two forms of language. Political dance, or the constitution of dance as a realm that does not require language, creates a shared embodied space between dancer and spectator, between equality and plurality; the equal- ity of bodies allows them to speak with each other unmediated by words; the plurality of beings pushes them to express them- selves through their bodies. Through these two aspects, dance is inscribed upon the body. The body is altered by inscription, informing it of communities and possibilities—a dancing body is never alone, but rather always conversing with an Other. But dancing subjects can transcend the boundaries of their communities and live in more than one world—both that constituted by dance as a method of communication and that constituted by words as a method of expression. As a practice that goes beyond boundaries, dance challenges demarcations between communities erected by verbal language, transcending spaces created by words: this happens at the moment dancers gain entry into a community larger than the one they were assigned, attesting to the equality of bodies.

Dance is a socio-political method and practice, a means of writing, narrating, and disseminating histories. It is a corporeal phenomenon that can be a catalyst for building communities and challenge and transcend the boundaries of societies and languages. The dancing body becomes the witness, a somato-testimonium—the body in a dance performance and the move- ments employed as a formal statement are equivalent to a written, spoken, eyewitness, or earwitness account, proof of a spatiotemporal reality.

The above leads me to developing the concepts of corpo-literacy and corpo-epistemology, involving the study of the nature and extent of bodily knowledge in dance performance, as well as how the body and dance performances produce, enact, inscribe, and propagate knowledge(s). Like epistemological studies in general, it is important to analyze bodies employed in dance in relation to notions of truth or belief. Thus, corpo-epistemology also focuses on manifestations of politicized, sexualized, genderized, and racialized bodies in performativity. Corpo- epistemology is preoccupied with questions like: What is bodily knowledge? How is bodily knowledge acquired? How is bodily knowledge expressed in dance performances? How can the observer of a performance decipher and relate to these bodily knowledges? If rhythm and dance provide the structure for a form of such bodily knowledge, what are the limits?

Maybe this research is an effort to grasp and practice phenome- nology through dance and involving the body in shared partici- patory experiences. Challenging some of the most prominent philosophical positions in the West certainly takes a lot of guts —especially if these positions embody the authorities of Husserl and Hegel. But as Esiaba Irobi points out:

Husserl, like Hegel, spent the greater part of his career trying to explain what transcendental phenomenology means and, in my view, never really came to grasps with what the concept really means to non-European peoples of the world. His problem or mental block was that he based his analysis on the positivist premise that phenomenology could be understood and explained through rational thought, verbal discourse or typo- graphical literacy. It cannot. Reading Husserl over and over again can never compare with an initiation into Candomble in Bahia or Santeria in Cuba or Voudoun in Haiti. Phenomenology, as a philosophical and per- formative concept, I contend, can only be fully grasped through action, through a bodily participatory experi- ence as we feel when we take part physically in a ritual, festival, carnival, dance, capoeira.

Fachgruppe

Raumstrategien

Modul IV: Praxisseminar: Herstellung von Veröffentlichungsmedien für das Theorie-Praxis- Projekt II

Modul V: Theorie-Praxis-Projekt III: Hauptprojekt

Modul V: Theorieseminar: Raum und öffentlicher Kontext

Modul V: Wahlpflichtfach

Modul I: Theorie-Praxis-Projekt I

Modul I: Praxisseminar: Performative Rauminterpretationen/Interventionen

Modul I: Theorieseminar: Raumanalyse

Modul II: Praxisseminar: Materialität und Medialität

Modul II: Theorieseminar: Medien und Kommunikation

Modul III: Theorie-Praxis-Projekt II

Modul III: Theorieseminar: Performativer Raum

Semester

Sommersemester 2026

Wann

Mittwoch, 10:00 – 17:00

Erster Termin

22.04.2026

Raum

HKW - PROF. DR. BONAVENTURE NDIKUNG office

Archivierung

August 2031

Lehrende