Do you enjoy open creative processes, are you interested in decolonizing practices, do you love to dance? Does exploring human-plant relationships through dance spark your imagination? Do you long to let your voice resonate with others? Do you (want to) practice letting go? Need to connect in community? Are you ready to encounter different, converging, artistic practices?
The dance ritual (process and performance) holds a central role within DOTE Festival Legacy & Seeds, which is, as a whole, adopting ritual as its form. The dance ritual is open, participative and collaborative. Different practices are developed and converge within it, and there are various ways to participate. You are invited to join the Dance Labs, Henna Lab, Incense Lab, and/or the Festival Labs, or equally, to join the process for the first time in the dance ritual performances themselves.
The two main strands of practice are the Legacy/Community Ritual and the Seeds Dance Ritual. You can participate in the Legacy/Community Ritual, led by Fazle Shairmahomed with artists-in-community Anima Jhagroe-Ruissen and Farah Rahman, by joining the Dance Labs, Henna Lab and/or Incense Lab. You can join the Seeds Dance Ritual, led by Shaymaa Shoukry and Ahmed Saleh (in collaboration with Fazle Shairmahomed and DOTE), by joining the Festival Labs in the heart of the festival.
We hope you register for several Labs and to participate in the performance dance rituals during the festival! [register here]
All Labs are free to attend. If you participate in one or more Labs, you can join the dance ritual performances (a ticket for that day of the festival) for free too.
THE LABS
Dance Labs 1- Rituals for Decolonization (with Fazle Shairmahomed)
Healing is communal, healing is spiritual, healing is in the body and in spaces in between, healing is to be in harmony with plants and nature. “What do you feel when you think about the spiritual power of plants and ancestry?”
This Lab aims to develop a personal and communal understanding of human and plant ancestry through spiritual practices of body movement, dance, meditation, writing, altar making and group conversation. What could communal healing look like in a society that is in part (being) shaped by colonial mechanisms?
Exercises inspired by Butoh, Body Weather, Gnawa and Zar will bring us to bodies that no longer exist, to the soul inside, towards the politicized body in which we exist. We will explore how our bodies relate, how the transcendental exists within the presence of a group. We will work on the (individual) path towards controlling or letting go. We will explore cyclical space (in approaching ancestry) and infinite space (through Analemma movement practice).
Dance Labs 2 – Rituals for Holding Space (with Fazle Shairmahomed)
We will explore more deeply different roles within a ritualistic context. How to step in and out of trance, connect and hold space for others? How do we invite newcomers into ‘our’ community with ritualistic acts, words, and gestures? Elements gathered in previous Labs will inspire how we shape this day together. We will continue to build on elements that have been present at the altar, crafting them into ways that could invite larger groups of people in. This Lab is open to those who are interested in holding space during the public performance dance rituals.
Henna Lab (with Anima Jhagroe-Ruissen in collaboration with Fazle Shairmahomed)
This Lab is about the creation of stories in collaboration with Henna/Mehndi. Storytelling and Henna come together in a ritualistic space where we experience what it means to ritualize oneself and each other with a plant historically and culturally widely used from North Africa to South Asia. We will explore the different stages of Henna, from leaves, to powder, to paste. We will explore communal designs for the performance dance rituals.
Incense Lab (with Farah Rahman in collaboration with Fazle Shairmahomed)
This Lab is about the creation of Incense. Participants are invited to develop their awareness of spices that resonate with them, and to reflect on how they have come into their lives. What migration histories do these spices carry with them? Are they connected to childhood memories? Are they connected to painful histories of cultural appropriation and exploitation? How can we give new meaning in a communal process by creating incense with these spices? Farah Rahman will assemble a collection of spices which participants will work with, based on questions people are asked before the Lab. We will make a few different combinations of incense sticks, some of which people will take home, leaving enough to be used during the Labs and performance dance rituals.
Festival Labs (with Shaymaa Shoukry and Ahmed Saleh)
Releasing, falling, witnessing, exhaustion, rest, solidarity, beyond grief, slowing, seeds, pelvis, human being, not human doing, body and land. Transforming, letting go, release, rebirth, remembering. These are starting points of the Festival Labs led by Cairo-based choreographer Shaymaa Shoukry. Working closely with musician Ahmed Saleh whose compositions treat sound as an intangible body, a being that envelops the voices and bodies of participants. Saleh will create sounds inspired by nature -sounds of wind, dust, soil, humming, water. The Festival Labs will build the Seeds Dance Ritual, continuing a long collaborative partnership between Shoukry and Saleh, and following on from the collective dance performance process Tuning In, a collaboration between Shoukry, Saleh and DOTE in the festival year of listening in 2023. The practices that Shoukry and Saleh will share in the Festival Labs are in part developed from the artistic research for the dance solo WOMB, which Shoukry and Saleh will also perform during the festival. Join the Festival Labs to participate in Seeds Dance Ritual, building on and converging with the Legacy/Community Ritual transforming the dance ritual for the festival closing.
