Exótica
The title reflects the practice of categorising art forms that are sexually charged and read as ‘foreign’, which still goes on today. In order to make this phenomenon and its contemporary resonances visible, Amanda Piña and her ensemble travel back into the past, where they revive the eroticised and, in some cases, queer stage artists La Sarabia, Nyota Inyoka, François ‘Féral’ Benga and Leila Bederkhan, who toured Europe with great success in the 1920s, in an exceptional form of séance. Here, Amanda Piña and her ensemble not only reveal the exoticising white gaze whose prevailing preconceptions about what was ‘Oriental enough’ or ‘African enough’ restricted artists’ room for manoeuvre. At the same time, Amanda Piña and her ensemble demonstrate the force with which the artists named were able to use this limited space to create choreographies of outstanding artistic quality that can still be viewed now in the form of drawings and visual documentation. Exótica is dedicated to these dances and sees itself as an homage to all those forgotten performers of colour who did not find a place in the canon of dance history and are only now slowly being rediscovered. For, even though the archives contain numerous newspaper articles attesting to their great popularity, after the Second World War, these dancers increasingly disappeared from European stages and popular memory.
Artist Talk following the performance on Fri 26.04., Christina Gillinger (dance scholar, TQW Magazin & library) in conversation with choreographer Amanda Piña, dramaturg Nicole Haitzinger and participants in the production. The talk will be held in English.
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is a Mexican-Chilean-Austrian choreographer, dancer and cultural worker living between Vienna and Mexico City. Her choreographic work is concerned with the decolonisation of art, focusing on the political and social power of dance, understood as a social-environmental movement. Her performances are contemporary rituals for temporarily dismantling the ideological separations between modern and traditional, the human, the animal and the vegetal, nature and culture. Amanda Piña is interested in making art beyond the idea of a product and in developing new frameworks for creating sensual experiences.
Credits
Artistic direction Amanda Piña With and by Ángela Muñoz Martínez, Zora Snake, Venuri Perera, iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo, Amanda Piña Dramaturgy Nicole Haitzinger Integral design Michel Jimenez Stage set, scenography Forêt Asiatique (1921) by Albert Dubosq, reproduced by Decoratelier Jozef Wouters as part of Amanda Piña’s contribution to Infini #18 (2022) Technical direction Marcelo Daza Light Emilio Cordero Music Ángela Muñoz Martínez, Zevra Sound design Dominik Traun Costumes Federico Protto Director’s assistant Pierre-Louis Kerbart Production Amanda Piña / Fortuna Coproduction Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Holland Festival, Amsterdam, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Tanzquartier Wien, PACT Zollverein, DDD – Festival Dias da Dança da Porto, La Bâtie – Festival de Genève, NEXT Festival, Bratislava Supported by De Singel, KWP Kunstenwerkplaats, wpZimmer Thanks to Stadsschouwburg Kortrijk, Showtex, Bruno Forment, the FWF-funded project Border Dancing Across Time P-31958, Christina Gillinger-Correa Vivar (archival research), Rolando Vázquez (decolonial theory/interview) Funded by the Municipal Department of Cultural Affairs, Vienna, and the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sports
In English and French with surtitles in German and English