(Indigenous) Performance as ontological praxis or anticolonial poiesis?

Due to unavoidable circumstances, this event has been postponed to 28 October 2025. We apologies for the inconvenience.

Critically revisiting my 2016 article “Dancing the Pluriverse: Indigenous Performance as Ontological Praxis,” in this talk, '“Dancing the Pluriverse” redux: (Indigenous) Performance as ontological praxis or anticolonial poiesis?', I engage with the article’s afterlives and exercise epistemological responsibility for its unintended consequences. Two interrelated phenomena compel this auto-critique: the incomplete turn toward decoloniality in dance and performance studies, and a postcoloniality that remains deferred through the near-global normalization of colonial violence, extractivism, and genocide as status-quo.

Concerned that the original claims in “Dancing the Pluriverse” may inadvertently legitimize onto-epistemic extractivism masked as decolonizing practice, I revise the article’s key concepts—ontological praxis, pluriversality, telluric relationality, and complex Indigeneity. I locate the source of the problematic applications of these concepts in the term praxis itself and its conceptual entanglement with poiesis within critical theory, and by extension, dance and performance.

Tracing praxis to its origins in ancient Greece, where it denoted the political activity of an elite citizenry and was distinguished from poiesis—the corpo-material labor of non-citizens and the enslaved—I examine how this praxis/poiesis dichotomy continues to haunt our fields. When praxis is applied to dance as a signifier of worldmaking, yet divorced from the corpo-material (i.e., poietic) processes that underlie ontology, dance risks becoming a mode of ontological extraction and annihilation cloaked in decolonial discourse.

I reflect on the implications of this haunting, drawing from examples in the Americas, and elsewhere, to conclude with a contrasting case. Following Arabella Stanger’s call for critical analyses of the material conditions undergirding dance, I engage Zapotec artist Lukas Avendaño’s 2023 performance of Ixquic at Centro Sotz’il Jay, a Kaqchikel cultural center in Guatemala. As the staged personification of Avendaño’s off-stage struggle against the necropolitical state, Ixquic knowingly danced upon the strata of a violent ground, revealing centuries of violence and dispossession, but also transcorporeally materializing embodied resistance to that violence, a form of poiesis without which a postcolonial future will never arrive.

The talk will be chaired by María Estrada Fuentes (Royal Holloway University of London, UK)

María Regina Firmino-Castillo is an engaged scholar and artist whose work examines the transcorporeal body as a site of ontological production, destruction, and transformation, especially in the contexts of ongoing coloniality. Trained in cultural anthropology and transdisciplinary studies, she brings an anti-paradigmatic lens to performance and embodied practice. Firmino-Castillo’s scholarly work exists in synergy with her artistic practice, and she has collaborated with Ixil artist Tohil Fidel Brito on a series of performances and site-specific projects in Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. With Brito and Kaqchikel artist Daniel Guarcax, Firmino-Castillo has co-authored experimental texts to articulate theories of movement vis-à-vis colonial prohibitions as well as contemporary persecutions of bodies in motion. She has also published several essays in relation to the work of Be’ena’Za’a (Zapotec) artist and anthropologist Lukas Avendaño. In a forthcoming essay (May 2025) in the edited volume Decoloniality in the Break of Global Blackness, she deploys practice-as-research to critically reflect on the failures, and potentials, of utopic performance experiments to break with the autopoietic perpetuation of coloniality and antiblackness as imbricated systems of catastrophic worldmaking. Her current book project is tentatively titled Crepuscular Bodies: Paradoxical Performance and Ongoing Catastrophe in Mesoamerica and Beyond. Firmino-Castillo is a faculty member in the Department of Dance at the University of California-Riverside.
https://dance.ucr.edu/faculty/maria-firmino-castillo/

María Estrada-Fuentes (chair) is Lecturer in Latin American Performance Cultures at the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance, Royal Holloway University of London. Her research interests include arts-based conflict transformation, complex victimhood, intimate partner violence in transitional contexts, politics and performance. Her publications include ‘A Grammar of Care: Morality, embodied emotion and the work of reintegration and reincorporation in Colombia’ (with Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Performance Research Issue On Care, 2023), ‘Performative Reintegration: Applied Theatre for Conflict Transformation in Contemporary Colombia’ (Theatre Research International, 2018) and ‘Affective Labors: Love, care and Solidarity in the Social Reintegration of Female Ex-combatants in Colombia’ (Lateral, 2016). Her upcoming monograph, Performative Reintegration: Applied Theatre for Transitional Justice in Contemporary Colombia(Bloomsbury, 2026) explores the embodied dimensions of post-conflict transitions evident in the reintegration of ex-combatants of guerrilla and paramilitary organisations.

The Series

Embodied performance arts like dance are central to examining questions of decoloniality, given that bodies marked by enslavement, discrimination or occupation can both express and resist these oppressions. Dance becomes a creative practice, and a form of thinking.

Moreover, if colonial ideologies have historically devalued, even eradicated the cultural practices of their colonized subjects, rhythms and movements can be stored in, and replayed by, the performer’s body. Inherited cultural practices like dance can thus re-enact past histories. Dance becomes a system of learning, storing, producing and transmitting knowledge: ‘body-thoughts’, to borrow the words of Black British choreographer-performers Alexandrina Hemsley and Seke Chimutengwende (‘The Future Stared Back at Us for the First Time: Black Holes Revisited’. Contemporary Theatre Review, 31. 1–2 (2021), 197–203).

Since 2022 the Goldsmiths Centre for Comparative Literature has hosted a series of talks on postcolonial performance(see the May 2022 and May 2023 series), and this year’s focus is specifically on dance.

We are delighted to welcome academics and performers who will discuss and analyse the theme of postcolonial dance from geographical areas which, while varied, share a common interest in resistance to oppression and/or occupation; the revival of indigenous or inherited practices; and the interrogation of fluid identities in a postcolonial world. These areas are Africa, South Asia, Latin America and Palestine.

All talks are online.

Find out more on the CCL's webpage for the 'Body thoughts' Series

Photo credits: From a performance of Seke Chimutengwende, It Begins in Darkness. Photo by Jemima Young.