MARII - FOR ANAIS who is helping me with this ongoing exposition by representing my students in Brussles primary schools community to whom I taught for many years.
This exhibition "Love, Joy, Politics and Care In The Margins, Situated Micro-learnings as spaces for diving into modes of transmission and relations of power" is a tool to map and trace the specificities of my filed of study. I have been adding more and more material every week as I am navigating with two courses of my master: MAR II and Dance Education as a Research Field. I am using RC as tool to identify interests and turns from which and where I dance in relation to/with and share them.
Some guidelines on how to experience this exposition:
I have numbered the areas of this exposition from 1 to 5. We start at 1.
1. Begin by scrolling all to the right. You will see a video with an ocean image. Here we start. Press play and enjoy the documentation around that area of the RC. 2. Then continue to scroll left and find Anais - my student - dancing video. Press play and engage with both, video and poem. 3. Then you can continue to the left and you find shelves with my references and literature that support my research and also diaries with practices I have been in conversation with. 4. You have also a space for questioning the creation of notebooks of practices as my master thesis. Where both communties with whom I work with would be documented and shared, crossing Belgian and Portuguese choreographic artists. 5. And finally, last left you find Practice of cartographing a practice brought by Tone Penilo, where we had to contour someone else's body with a knitting yarn, then we would try to answer by automatic writing, some key questions to help us situate our practice, and place this post it's and papers around our yarned-body-contour. For each body part – post-it I have selected a sound. I collect audio recordings as a practice that helps me to trace what moves me and what it does to me. Sometimes I use them to dance, other times as a soundscape to write.
But my favourite way to experience this exposition is just to stay here an there, in one or two areas for a while and see what emerges from that. Follow your own timing and trust that it´s really not relevant for me if you see all of it. It´s more about choosing where your curiosity takes you and how we dialogue.
Maybe the ideal RC for me is when we all can inscribe ourselves in it. To leave it open by allowing everyone who visits this page can also add their own mappings and tracings.
FEET SOUND / press play // follow the black line for other possibilities of adding to your sound narrative
women´s choir - Portugal
Freedom felt in the feet. Grounding as resistance. Traditional singing from rural Portugal.
composing in singing as a choir, as many women inside me, as a practice to let words vibrate inside to the world. I find it healing as if all my idendities come out wihtout passing my brain.
In what ways does performance reinforce, validate, support, question, or undermine dominant beliefs and values? How do performances navigate the tension between conforming to and resisting societal norms? How can they both maintain and challenge systems of power? What tools or strategies within performance can disrupt dominant narratives or "master scripts"?
scroll down for full list of literature
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LOCATING THE PRACTICE
1. bell hooks – Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994)
Chapter 1: “Engaged Pedagogy”. pp13-21
Chapter 2: “Revolution of Values”. Pp. 23-34
Chapter 14: Ecstasy: Teaching and Learning Without Limits pp. 201-208
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bell hooks – Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory - (Pages: 1–17)
Chapter 4: Revolutionary Feminist Consciousness (Pages: 31–42)
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Gloria Anzaldúa – Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
Chapter 1: “The Homeland, Aztlán / El otro México” Pages 7–25
Chapter 2: “Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan” Pages 35–45
Chapter 5: “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” Pages 53–64
Chapter 7: “La conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness”Pages 99–113
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Marta Rema - Ela Desnomeia, Buala (2025)
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK — AFFECT, FEMINIST ETHICS, AND SITUATED KNOWING
This section outlines the conceptual backbone of the inquiry, focusing on care, affect, and embodied knowledge production.
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Sara Ahmed – The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004)
Chapter 1: “Introduction: Feel your way”pp1 - 19
Chapter 2: “The Organisation of Hate” pp42-61.
Chapter 3: “Queer Feelings” pp144-167
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Erin Manning – Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (2009)
“Events of Relation—Concepts in the Making” pp.5-12
Chapter 1: Incipient Action: The Dance of the Not-Yet – Page 13-28
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María Puig de la Bellacasa – Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (2017)
Chapter 1: Assembling Neglected “Things” p27 -68
Chapter 3: Touching Visions p95-124
Chapter 5: Nothing Comes Without Its World p.151–174
METHODOLOGY — PRACTICE-LED RESEARCH, RC, LIMINALITY, AND NON-LINEAR TRANSMISSION
Here, the paper develops its research strategy through posthuman and performative methodologies, with a focus on embodied epistemologies and liminal pedagogical spaces.
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Donna Haraway – Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016)
Chapter 1: “Playing Companion Species Politics”pp9-29
Chapter 2: “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene”. Pp30-57
Chapter 7: “The Camille Stories: Children of Compost”. Pp134-168
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Victor Turner – The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969)
Chapter 2: “Liminality and Communitas” — pp. 28–56
Chapter 5: “The Liminality of Status Elevation and Reversal” — pp. 95–115 T
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Victor Turner – The Anthropology of Experience (1986)
Introduction: Experience and Its Expressions (Pages: 3–30)
Chapter 2: Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience (Pages: 33–44)
Chapter 8: Performance and the Structuring of Meaning and Experience (Pages: 159–206)
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Dwight Conquergood – “Poetics, Play, Process, and Power: The Performative Turn in Anthropology”
(1989)
LIVING ARCHIVE — FOR ANÄIS
13. Trinh T. Minh-Ha – “Speaking Nearby” (1983), Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 22(1– 2), pp. 36–64
14. Chen, N.N., 1992. Speaking nearby: A conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha. Visual Anthropology Review, 8(1), pp.82–91
15. Catarina Vieira – “Survival Kit,” Coreia Dance Journal
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Teaching is Performance, PINEAU
https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/am-educ-res-j-1994-pineau-3-25.pdf
heart sound/press play
Artistic spaces that support access, care, and non-hierarchical collaboration.
Conversations with friends at parks # Lisboa 2020 # during pandemic.
Also collectted some conversations with friends as a tools for understanding how we think. Entering eachothers frustrations and how we ended up being who we are. Allowing ourselves to not be productive for a couple of hours.
Here we are sharing specificities of our fields. He works in cinema and she works in dance. From there they uncover methods, ways of looking, modes of practicing and how ethics are related with aesthetics. They use metaphores for learning. They storytell. They fictionalities encounter possibilities for communities to survive in capilalism and together they fabulate worlds and resist.
head sound/press play
walking with other species - birds life
I do many Walking as practice of belonging to Brussels. This one at Josaphat Park. 3 minute wlaking distance from my flat.
documenting dance studio practices - small notebooks from choreographic artists we encounter/work with, and to publish them in order to share other ways of generating knowlogede.
DANCE STUDIO PRACTICES (incomplete) we tried out as ways to embody an image or a collection of images:
1. observing 10 to 12 images. During 30 minutes all participants say words by what they see in the images. Questioning the image to get information.
2. each participant has the same 10 to 12 images. Each participant organises their images. They decide their narrative. We will have as many narratives as many participants.
3. go into the sapce and dance Authentic Movement practice for 30 minutes
4. go to the images. What concrete actions do your see?
4. discovere which CONCRETE GESTURES you can do in the space.
5. Authentic Movement
6. mix them.
during 30min everyone gets to ask questions about this image/s.
1. some of the questions of task 1:
WHAT SONG GOES WITH WHAT YOU SEE?
WHAT GESTURES COULD TRANSLATE THE IMAGE?
WHAT COLOURS DO YOU SEE?
WHAT SHAPES DO YOU SEE?
WHAT EMOTIONS IS THE IMAGE EVOKING ON YOU? WHAT IS SHE FEELING?
WHERE TODAY THIS IMAGE COULD BE SHOWN AND FOR WHAT PURPOSES?
WHAT IS SHE WEARING?
FOR HOW LONG IS SHE STANDING THERE?
WHO MIGHT BE THE AUTHOR OF THE IMAGE WE ARE DESCRIBING?
HOW IS THEIR RELATIOSHIP?
ARE THERE MORE PEOPLE IN THE ROOM?
WHAT VERBS COME TO YOUR MIND?
WHAT COULD BE THE IMAGE BEFORE/AFTER THIS ONE?
IF THERE WERE OTHER WOMEN WITH HER IN THE IMAGE, WHAT WOULD THEIR BODY SHAPE? DO A FEW STILL POSITIONS?
WHAT IS SHE DOING?
WHAT IS SHE SINGING?
HOW DO YOU IMAGE THIS PERSON LIVES? DESCRIBE A DAY IN THIS PERSON´S LIFE.
WHAT QUESTIONS WOULD SHE ASK ME/US IF SHE WAS HERE NOW?
HOW DOES HER VOICE SOUNDS LIKE?
WHERE WOULD SHE BE IN THE ROOM?
WHAT WOULD SHE BE BUSY WITH?
WHAT WOULD SHE TEACH IF SHE WAS TO DO SO?
HOW WOULD SHE LEARN IF SHE WAS IN YOUR CLASSROOM?
HOW WOULD YOU MAKE A SAFE SPACE FOR HER TO LEARN? WHAT TYPE OF TASK WOULD MAKE HER INTERESTED/CURIOUS/PRESENT?
IF SHE WOULD REPRESENT A TAROT CARD WHAT WOULD BE HER SPEL/DIVINATION? WHAT WOULD IT MEAN?
HOW MANY TIMES DID SHE DO THIS CARRY?
WHAT IN THE IMAGE TELLS YOU/ INDICATES YOU SHE CARRIED IT A CERTAIN NUMBER OF TIMES?
DOES SHE MAKE SOUND WHEN SHE LIFTS IT?
what are the missing gestures in the image?
WHAT OTHER GESTURES BELONG THIS WOMEN IN THE IMAGE?
DID IT LAND ON HER HAND/ARMS FROM UP?
DID YOU NOTICE SHE IS LOOKING AT US?
WHAT OTHER GESTURES BELONG THIS WOMEN IN THE IMAGE?
TAKE 10min to DRAW what stayed in you from these questions?
USE BLACK AND A COLOUR. THE COLOUR IS USED IF YOU WAN TOT HIGHLIGHT SOMETHING IN THE DRAW.
OBSERVER THE GROUP AND THEIR DANCINGS.
AUDIO RECORD YOURSELF DESCRIBING THEIR DANCINGS. BE CONCRETE AS IF SOEMONE ELSE WOULD THEN HAVE TO DANCE ACCORDINLY TO YOUR AUDIO.
A void that is not exactly an interruption but rather a preparation for something else. A dynamic that suggests the possibility of the not-yet-produced. Although unnecessary ― as it is not linked to a symbolic, material or historical need― it would nevertheless favor a related phenomenon: the appearance of dance’s conditions of existence. PAZ ROJO
And in the imbalance we echo: we're still here, we're rhizomes, constellations, fractals, and tomorrow.
They agreed to kill us.
And we agreed not to die.
For Anais,
I came to Anais´s school every week to teach dance class. I remember Anais as she was 7 and first came to dance class.Then she was 8, then 9, and one day she was 11 and looked just like you see here. As a write I can´t stop gently smiling. I guess this is was is left from accompanhing children becoming teenagers while they learn dance in dance classes. Many times I have wonder how my dance instructions were landing on her. She was quiet. She was behaving all the time. I have wondered how to provide her a moments of strenght, sense of belonging, promote thought, freedom, joy and plant seeds of dreaming high.
Today ANAIS is 15. I ask myself, will she bring dance lessons with her as a way to RESIST and not let FEAR to EXIST AS she is becoming?It turns out to be a radical imagination exercise to try to see that..How can we imagine things that don't exist? WAS ANAIS DOING THAT AS SHE WAS DANCING? WAS SHE imaging BEYONG what exists, imagining the impossible?I HOPE YES.
abstract AND in shapeless matter, THE again catastrophe, THE memory of the end, AND we close our eyes AND WE keep pushing the sky a little further.We are still here, designing communities, fictionalising encounters, fantasising futures and speculating spaces of synchronised breathing and affection.
an example of a micro-learning session in this one - MAR II examination
- 30min presentation on zoom
- What I am wearing:
a blakc suit
a vintage second hand 2eur flowery shirt
a wood neclace made by my 5 year old godchil Gabi
As I welcome participants to my micro-teaching session I start kniting. I will do both pratices during the 30min.
#teaching lecturer,
#teaching as performance,
#participatory leanring context
#democratic classroom
Love, Joy, Politics and Care In The Margins
Situated Micro-learnings as spaces for diving into modes of transmission and relations of power.
Liminal Pedagogies and Decolonial Practices in Dance and Performance Education
This research arises from my lived experience as an artist, educator, and researcher moving between Lisbon and Brussels—between languages, institutions, and pedagogical cultures. It is grounded in a long-standing concern with how power and authority operate within educational settings, particularly in the field of dance. I approach pedagogy not as a neutral act, but as a cultural, political, and embodied practice, shaped by dominant ideologies that determine what is seen as legitimate knowledge, and by whom. Through a performative and liminal methodology, I investigate how knowledge is transmitted, interrupted, and reimagined within dance and the performing arts. I begin from a position of not-knowing — not as absence or lack, but as a deliberate epistemological and ethical stance. Working with the unprepared unknown becomes a way of engaging with pedagogy as a site of possibility: one that resists closure, welcomes instability, and fosters more equitable and imaginative ways of teaching and learning. This research critically engages with the legacy of patriarchal, Eurocentric, and hierarchical structures in arts education, while also foregrounding the work of artists, educators, and communities who are developing alternative pedagogical models. The aim is not to offer fixed solutions, but to generate a living, responsive framework for understanding how knowledge can move—across bodies, across geographies, and across time.
Research questions
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How does language shape and constrain the transmission of knowledge in dance education?
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What is the relation between the researcher, the participants, the research material and the
knowledge created?
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What does it mean to teach and learn from a position of not-knowing?
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How can we document artistic-pedagogical processes in ways that are rigorous yet open,
embodied yet critically reflective?
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What role can artist-teacher-researchers play in reshaping institutions through decolonial and
feminist approaches?
Research Design & Methods
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Regular Meetings: One-week intensive or weekend sessions held once a month over six months, followed by three months dedicated to data collection.
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Development of a Manual: A collaboratively informed guide offering methodologies for horizontal, non-hierarchical power dynamics in arts education, with Practical tools for classroom rules, policies, and relational structures.
Online Inquiry Form: A tool for open participation and wider community input. Maybe with RC.
Some of the theory I find supportive for my research project subject area:
1.bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center
Summarise:
2.bell hooks, Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom
3.Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.
Summary: challenges the idea of heroic, individual solutions to global crises, proposing instead that we engage with complexity through sustained, collective, and situated practices. She introduces the concept of “making kin”—forming unexpected, multispecies alliances—as a way to reimagine responsibility and co-existence in a damaged world. Haraway invites us to stay with the uncertainty and messiness of the present, rather than seeking escape, in order to cultivate more livable futures.
Summarise: teaching is performing.
5.Conquergood, D. (1989). Poetics, play, process and power: The performative turn in
anthropology. Text and Performance Quarterly, <X}), 82-88.
Summarize: performance and anthropology
6.Turner, V. (1969) The Tirtual Process, Structure and Anti-Structure
pp.94- .. chapter 3: Lminality and Communitas Form and Attributes of Rites of Passage
pp.166-... chapter 5: Humility and Hierarchy: The Liminality of Status Elevation and Reversal summarize:
7.Turner, V. (1986) The Anthropology of Experience
8.Marta Rema (2025) Corpo
Summary: Body article by Marta Rema published on https://www.buala.org/pt/corpo/ela-desnomeia where she reflects on the essay on of Ursula K. Le Guin She Unnames Them.