Kirsi Monni's Montreal lecture

"In Ula Sickle's work Solid Gold, we don’t see an entertaining black guy dancing to the music. Instead we hear his breath and feel his footsteps, which dance around the cultural and colonial history of black Africans. The intense presence of the dancer prohibits the audiences’ immersion in an entertaining flow of dancing, thus making visible the dance as a consciously choreographed act, a collection of socio-cultural gestures indicating the economic and political ideologies that lie underneath. From this work I read references to social dancing as well as to the entertainment industry, to undocumented personal histories as well as to collective histories of colonialism and the African Diaspora. What touches me here is the simplicity of the presentation, which allows me to closely perceive the dancing as an embodied thinking of one’s cultural and political heritage. "

Kirsi Monni from "What Kinds of Ideas Are Guiding Choreographic Work? - conceptualising choreography since 1960s"

The full article can be downloaded here :
(highly recommended!)
www.tangente.qc.ca