The mind is not the only repository of memory, the body is its primary receptor and dance is its artistic decoding. This is how Rafael Palacio, a choreographer by profession, explains it when referring to the importance of movement as a cultural expression in Develaciones.
By: Pompilio Peña Montoya
Photo: Courtesy
Rafael Palacio is the director and founder of the Sankofa Afro Corporation, created 25 years ago. The word Sankofa means ‘return to the root’. For Rafael, that return is done with the body, with dance, with dance and with gestures, movements created from experiences and generational memories.
The expression Sankofa, in the words of Rafael, is a philosophy that proposes to know the past as a condition to understand the present and project a better future. For this reason, the artist understands the corporal expression of Afro-descendants, indigenous people and peasants as a living and universal archive.
This idea was key in Rafael’s work as choreographer of Unveilings: a song to the four winds. In this play, promoted by the Truth Commission, about 100 actors and dancers participate. These artists represent on stage the drama of the victims of violence in their search for recognition.
We Make Memory spoke with Rafael to learn more about that intimate relationship between dance and memory, expressed from those historically excluded populations and with a rich artistic manifestation. The work disclosures was presented at the Bogota International Theater Festival held between April 1 and 9, 2022.
Dance has a deep relationship with memory, that is, with the body. How can we understand such close ties?
The body is the one that dances and the body has a file. That file is the memory, the experiences that he has built from the oppression that has fallen on him; either by signs of social injustice or cognitive injustice, which is when someone is denigrated to create negative images.
So when the body dances it reveals the memory of pain. But, in addition, and it is very important in the specific case of Afro-descendant, indigenous and peasant cultures, the body also dances the memory of resistance, of victories, of the struggles that people have given to survive and evade everything that It has restricted their existence, all those social structures that have denied them humanity.
Each of the cultures, peoples and territories that were in disclosures, are narrating those struggles and victories. This dialogue flows because we are all human beings, beings who, in the midst of oppression, achieve different ways and strategies to emancipate ourselves. See also: Corpographies: art, body, memory, peace and reconciliation
In that sense, the work disclosures seeks a united Colombia against injustices, policies and structures that take away the humanity of the peoples.
In the work ‘Unveilings: a song to the four winds’ the krump, an urban dance, transmits a message of resistance. He hears the stories of the young krump dancers in the upcoming ‘Making the Invisible Visible’ interview. #Unveilings pic.twitter.com/p6cXLlvJvf
— Truth Commission (@CommisionVerdadC) March 19, 2022
Memory is part of a story or many. Through what forms does the body externalize this file that you refer to?
When we talk about dance we cannot forget that we have to get away from the form. It is not the beauty with which the body can dance that should speak to us and impact us in the first degree, but the social, political, geographical, spiritual and human context that springs up in the body so that it dances in that way.
Afro-descendant urban dance, for example, more than a few bodies that dance and enchant the public, is an artistic manifestation that is born in the most impoverished neighborhoods of Chocó. These young people create a protective environment with dance to be able to speak to the rest of the world, to seek solutions to immediate problems when they come across a State that turns its back on the Colombian Pacific.
The same goes for indigenous and peasant cultures. When the Wayúu show us their dance, we see a sacred and ancient dance that is telling us that there is an origin that is not respected in Colombia. Here, when people insult each other, they do so with the expression ‘this Indian’, as if the reference were pejorative.
That is why I believe that artistic manifestations call for human dignity, to recover what human beings create with their own spirituality, adapted to their own philosophy and ways of seeing the world.
Dance for us at Sankofa is a political place. It is a body that is capable of expressing itself to claim justice, to claim what belongs to it in this society.
Sometimes the impression remains that dance is considered in the big show as a secondary expression devoid of cultural identity. What kind of forces move the native dance in our regions?
What we need is to understand the role of culture in the communities and in the various peoples that we have in the country. I believe that these concepts of ‘high culture’, which are anchored in an egocentric imaginary, must be demolished. This look provokes to call the local and identity manifestations as folklore, when in fact they are knowledge, they are life strategies. See also: “Art is the great tool to make memory”: Gilmer Mesa
Communities create art, culture and knowledge. Matters that are not in the museum or in the academies. Art in the communities is a strategy that allows peoples to survive.
The spectacularization of artistic manifestations is an important issue for me. In Colombia we are always believing that when the artistic manifestations of the people are stylized, it is when they can speak to the rest of the world. We believe that the local cannot be universal. We believe that the local does not speak loud enough. When in fact a bambuco or a currulao, a mapalé or an urban dance, can speak to the world of the daily realities that this town faces.
That’s why I think that’s where the strength of disclosures. And it is that we do not believe that cultures should be stylized in order to speak to the rest of the world. We believe that art is an instrument inherent to all peoples, to all cultures. And in a contemporaneity it is not outside of time, of the discourse of that people, of the struggles that that people is building.
How does dance, understood as a component of the work, manage to express a political sense of vindication?
In this work, for example, the recruitment of boys and girls in the Pacific is discussed, and that work in the work is carried out by young people from Chocó, with their movements. Together with Sankofa we created a choreography where several companies interact to carry that message and we do it with movements that have to do with our own culture. That is to say: we speak to the world with our own language.
In each of these choreographies there is an implicit discourse that is political. That dance is not outside of the needs that we are trying to fill. The public has to learn to read the implicit.
I want to add that we believe that dance in this country has been undervalued. We are in a country that thinks that dance is not a professional job. Although we can find people who have dedicated their entire lives to it. That is a way of assuming life.
This is an educational task, where little by little the audiences have to deconstruct imaginaries of exoticism, of eroticism, for example, that are influenced in Afro-descendant peoples when we dance. It is an opportunity for us to see that when indigenous cultures dance, they are showing us their ancestral legacy. But they are also showing us how they have been able to face all the difficulties they have had to endure after the discovery of America.