Exploring identification via motion | Assessment
Phrases by Paula Catalina Riofrio.
What do the territories we develop and dwell into characterize for us? What represents us? The Zebras Crossing Collective, created in 2021, made an intriguing analysis about multiheritage identities throughout Africa and the UK, aiming at these questions. The mission started via an change program between musician Yogin Sullaphen, Dance Artist Francesca Matthys in addition to filmmaker Daniel Martin, which later developed into an Experimental Dance Movie Trilogy involving Kieron Jina as dramaturg, Florent Venet as Costume Designer and Amy Lee Braaf as illustrator/Social Media Advisor. It has subsequently developed into an Experimental Dance Movie Trilogy involving Kieron Jina as dramaturg and Francesca Matthys as performer.
The trilogy explores identification as a connection to ancestral tradition as a lot as a renovation and generative follow. It begins with Navigating the Now, Unlearning to Have fun, and finishes with Submerged in Loss. Every certainly one of them varies in size and state of affairs woven by a single query, who am I?
She’s touched her previous and is beginning to style the irremediable future. Inside Navigating the Now, the primary movie of the trilogy, Francesca is seated barefoot, consuming handfuls, voices run within the again and throughout her head. Carrying a white gown, she senses the meals together with her contact and savours the weather that made doable the expansion of each seed and department. The soundscape that surrounds her is the acknowledgment of the end result of distinction. She is alone however linked to her tradition, to her others; it appears as if the picnic was shared by many. The meals has completed however her arms are tinged; life has occurred, adjustments have been made in her appears to be like and in her insides. One thing is merging, she is different, navigating the now because the voices run within the background laced with the songs of birds.
Her actions impel virtually in whispers, she accelerates as claiming to know, to retrieve. Submerged in Loss takes us to the pure essence of human communion, The Ritual. Francesca wakes ashore, caressing the sand, grubbing up vestiges as soon as lined by ocean. A choir of heaven-like voices and the fading vibrations of a cymbal contrapose to looped and glitched voices; the Uhandi bow dialogues with the waves. She encounters the previous in bones. She’s sand and reminiscences mesmerised in motion. Her hips, her ft and lips discover their method as they inhabit the outdated and new of this territory. She falls to the ground and I ponder about what was for her and isn’t any extra; as in her arms she sews the current. The sundown is close to to interrupt the day in two; a cranium and bones in her arms, reached from beneath the soil, turned to mud – the best way we’ll all go. Francesca finds herself rooted on her pores and skin.
Synchronised to the beating of a drum, Francesca’s actions throw arrows of air. It twists the folds of her gown constituted of many fragments of colored cloths. Unlearning to Have fun, the ultimate installment of the trilogy, deconstructs the heritage of the person’s identification so as to reconfigure step-by-step new layers of the self. Motion, as most of life is, makes us topics to be taught and unlearn our identification, briskly, closely. She tears away what just isn’t her, what’s solely and distantly inherited. Her actions are a self-expropriation of the rubric of the previous, a quest for her core.
