Date: 18 January evening 19:00
Location:  ATD, Jodenbreestraat 3, room 8.09
Contributors:  Juan Carlos Palma Velasco / Escuela Nacional de Danza Folklórica.

Register for this event via email: obiektofilia@gmail.com

In autumn 2022 we, a group of second year students of DAS theatre, travelled to Mexico City to look into ways of relating to grief and death in Mexican culture and tradition. As a part of this research, we took part in Mexican folkloric dance classes. Can embodying a practice be a way to decolonize knowledge? How can dance be a way to grief? We believe that our movement workshop is a way of extending the embodied archive of culture. The workshop will consist of introduction, theoretical and practical parts as well as Q&A. Dancers and choreographers as well as people interested in movement practice and research are invited to take part in the workshop (open level). 

We propose a workshop of Mexican folkloric dance for the students of the ATD, led online by Professor Juan Carlos Palma Velasco of the Escuela Nacional de Danza Folklórica. In this workshop we will encounter folkloric dances related to grief. After the workshop there will be a conversation with the students of both academies to create a bridge between Amsterdam and Mexico City, the AHK and the Inbal (Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura).

Danza de los diablos: 

In this course we will work on the practical and corporal bases of an Afro-descendant dance tradition from the southern coast of Mexico; we will learn about the corporeality present in the dance of the devils of Cuajinicuilapa Guerrero and its link with the celebration of the Day of the Dead.

Juan Carlos Palma is a Mexican indigenous (mixtecan) origin artist, performer, and researcher in the field of traditional and post folkloric dance. He currently works as a full-time professor at Escuela Nacional de Danza Folklórica / Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes - Mexico.

His practice has focused on memory, identity processes, as well as the embodiment and forms of actualization and change of traditional dances as ways of resistance to global colonial modernity, working from the body and its narratives as living archives.

He got a Master in Dance Research by Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e información de la Danza José Limón (CENIDID Mexico). Degree in folkloric dance from Escuela Nacional de Danza Folklórica (ENDF) and also certified as a specialist in Language Of Dance (LOD - Ann Hutchinson-Guest) by the Language Of Dance Centre, U.K. He has been awarded the grants Creadores Escénicos programme (2016-17) of the Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) and DanceWEB in Austria in 2021.