Moving Borders
Moving Borders workshop at La Briqueterie CDCN
Read | 13 February 2025The team of Moving Borders met at la briqueterie CDCN du Val-de-Marne from 18-20 November 2024. For this meeting we received an additional financial support from the institut ukranien.
Read Karina Buckley reflecting on the three day workshop.
The meeting included working sessions using physical practices and reflection to explore notions of borders and identity. From language and movement improvisation to contemporary Palestinian dabke, two guest artists Léonce Noah and Nur Garabli each shared their practice and experience of resistance and community building in contexts of conflict or migration. What are borders, physical or emotional ? How do we navigate transitions ? What makes us human? These questions were explored in an afternoon session with artists Rita Lira, Nur Garabli and Sylvie Balestra and a group of youngsters, triggered by the show Rites de passage.
Picture: Nadège Le Lezec
Karina Buckley’s Journal: 18 - 20 November 2024
The third and final in-person Moving Borders workshop took place at partner organisation and French national choreographic centre (CDNC) La Briqueterie in Vitry-sur-Seine over three days in November 2024. The programme, which was co-designed by the CDNC and Rita Lira, one of the three Ukrainian dance artists at the core of the project, took a broader view of dance practices in zones of migration and conflict. With contributions from Ivorian dance researcher Léonce Noah and Palestinian choreographer Nur Garabli, the gathering became an exploration of the moving body as political instrument and agent of cultural resistance.
Thirteen invited Ukrainian artists participate, two of whom are still based in their homeland and one, Viktor Ruban, was turned back at the border so joined the gathering over Zoom as a sometimes ethereal presence – regular power outages meant that his only light source was often his laptop. Rita Lira leads the first practice which she later tells us was designed to be grounding: to reconnect the body with emotions that were impossible to process at the time of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The practice calls upon us to work in pairs, changing roles half way through; one person lying down with eyes closed and the other drawing attention to the borders of their body, using gentle touch then increased pressure to administer a kind of staccato massage that opens the senses. Later, we stand and drift about the space, one moving blindly with eyes closed, the other guiding and directing with a light touch, then no touch at all. There is no leader and follower – just a constant dialogue through physical and energetic contact. We end up as a cluster of bodies, leaning on and supporting each other. It’s a magical experience that finds us better defining ourselves through connection with others. Reflecting on the practice, Ruban points out that he uses similar grounding practices with military and displaced people in Ukraine to create a sense of agency and connection to one’s own physical borders, even when national ones are being violated.
Next Léonce Noah introduces his choreographic methodology, Broukabrou-Rélâché, which uses everyday gestures, poetic writing and improvisation to embody concepts and ideas. After a dynamic warm-up that mines the energy and aesthetic of a riot (think throwing stones, kicking down doors, flailing arms and legs), we stop moving and start writing, pondering the words ‘border’, ‘limit’ and ‘crossing’ in a freewheeling improvisational text that is distilled down to a single sentence then repeated as a mantra as we move about the space. As each mantra becomes embodied, dance and movement dialogues emerge, shaped by conditions Noah imposes e.g. this is the border – your movements are constrained around the border. Playing with his proposals, the results are hypnotic as bodies and voices combine to capture the struggle and strain of pushing against limits.
Nur Garabli sets up the first workshop of Day 2 by describing the conflicts at work within her own body as a Palestinian resident of Israel. Her efforts to reclaim folk dance Dabke from cultural appropriation gives us a lot to think and talk about throughout the rest of the day (and week) but we begin with a practice based on its grounding, weight-shifting movements that connect us to the earth. Dancing in a circle (a tribal form that facilitates vigilance against predators), we lunge, dive, squat and twist as we explore Dabke’s farming roots with movement grown from the actions of planting, watering and harvesting. Holding hands, we recreate some of the choreography from Garabli’s recent work, Arabesqua, which she later explains plays on two identities, evoking the western balletic interpretation of the word arabesque as well as the geometric, ornamental designs it describes in Islamic art. Her reflections open up a rich seam of thought around folk dance as embodied archive, act of resistance, agent of decolonisation and a means to advance mutual understanding. They also reveal her own struggles as an artist living under occupation – political, physical and psychological.
Folk dance is a topic that also occupies us in the final session of the day, which follows a fun and fruitful interaction between the Moving Borders participants and a group of young people encountering dance through La Briqueterie’s schools’ programme. Alla Kravchenko begins the workshop by borrowing from one of yesterday’s practices to propose migrating between movement meditations based on three words – action, observation and witnessing. She explained that the task reflects her own inner conflicts as an exile, and draws a line between the passive act of observation and the active process of witnessing her compatriots’ experience (action) during a time of war. Viktor Ruban takes over to propose that we (physically) ponder first the dance of our ethnicities, then the dance of our nationality and finally, to explore how the two co-exist in our bodies; the steps, forms and shapes that emerge would be familiar to anyone who ever did character dance as part of the ballet grade syllabus. The session prompted a nuanced conversation around Ukrainian heritage, how it has been diluted by cultural appropriation and how it might be restored by embracing traditional song, dance and language.
This soft power of culture is also acknowledged in a wide-ranging conversation with Natalya Guzneko Boudier, Director of the Ukrainian Institute in France on the final morning of our workshop. She highlights the value of culture as a means of diplomacy and creating common ground, and emphasises the role it would play in building Ukraine forward. She also describes artists as precious assets in protecting national heritage and points out how dance’s universality makes it especially valuable and deserving of support. During this discussion and the wrapup session for the project that follows, the participating artists underline the worth of programmes like Moving Borders to build resilience, communities and networks, to exchange practices and ideas, and to promote cultural exchange. After this first iteration, they expressed a desire to see Moving Borders move forward – it is one that all of us would second.
