After 1,5 years after knowing this residency was happening and the wish of making this work happen, the time finally arrived, and many circumstances had changed. Life decisions, available times, and even the realisation of the original idea had already happened.

We arrived in Flensburg and Pilkentafel, to get to know each other and the people involved in the theatre and flausen+. Our days with our mentor Aisha were very inspiring, and it was a great gift to have her for the beginning and our coming together. We talked about our current and new wishes for our thematic:  Working with Venezuelan folkloric dances and inviting the styles and practices that we carry in our bodies, our intent for this residency is to explore through rhythmical experiments, the experienced sensation of time and space.

The folk dance that we are exploring is Joropo, a couple dance influenced by African, indigenous, and Spanish rhythms, in the region of Los Llanos in Venezuela and Colombia. This is a culture well supported by feminine figures in the region. However, the music is mainly performed and represented by masculine figures, and the role of these female supporters gets dissolved into the frenzy of these cultural events. We look to give voices to these silence voices, by re-connecting to our own feminine spirits and giving them a voice through our bodies and their diverse rhythmicalities.

During our first week we performed a diversity of practices and exercises together: creating soundscapes of places we are familiar with our voices; house dance sessions where we experimented learning set and improvised footwork from each other; swarm exercises to become a collective body; watching documentation of joropo and performing dance sessions the “traditional” way; discussions of what spirituality is and what we understand as connection to female spirits; composing rhythms together; questioning gender roles…

The question is: how to bring all these things together?

Layer, to later, to layer, to layer….

What is it to become of all these things…?