A year of motion, a dialogue of bodies—researchers, artists, and archives converge in the Dutch Art Institute’s COOP program, tracing the pulse between politics and poetics as embodiment and resistance through collective and embodied practices. Choreopoethics: Undisciplined Corporeal (2023-2024) brought together research trajectories by Archive Ensemble and students of the Dutch Art Institute’s COOP program.
Guided by archive ensemble tutors, Lilia Di Bella, Chiara Figone, and Samira Ghoualmia the Dutch Art Institute’s study group engaged in experimental, interdisciplinary research challenging rigid disciplinary boundaries, following the guiding question of how we can move together politically.
Choreopoethics is a transitory compound word Archive formulated to create a field of inquiry that brings together multiple reflections around the body as an archive, embodied knowledge and movement practices at the forefront of protest, and choreographic planning as an active tool of disobedience.
The term Choreopoethics formulated by Archive inhabited a space of critical investigation, gathering multiple reflections around the body as a loving archive of embodied knowledge and movement practices, at the forefront of protest, and choreographic planning as an active tool of disobedience.
The term shares roots with choreopoems, a form pioneered by African-American writer Ntozake Shange in 1975. A choreopoem weaves poetry, dance, music, and song into a singular expressive force. In this spirit, our COOP study group challenged the primacy of written text, embracing the body itself as a powerful medium of poetic expression and tool of resistance.
How do we embrace memory and the collective body as living archives in our practices and in relation to Choreopoetics? How do we come together– collectively creating spaces of co-learning, sharing tools within community-building and environments of gathering that can merge into forms of transgressive pedagogies? How can we identify accomplices and find lasting practice in solidarity and in political action? How do we move politically?
Rooted in Black feminist traditions, poetic expressions such as Transbluesency, and the crisscrossing of dance, poetry, and collective practice, have always sought to nourish liberatory pedagogies. All of these practices unsettle fixed narratives of marginalization, building shared spaces with common grounds for networks of solidarity.
During the many confluence when our study group met, we learned about different trajectories- all in relation to questions of liberation, tools of disobedience and community building. As we tackled these questions, to nurture our desire for radical pedagogies of liberation and alternative pathways of knowledge transmission, we talked to artists, researchers, and practitioners to study together.
Our discussions circled about radical pedagogies of liberation—how knowledge is transmitted not only through words but through the body, memory, and shared experience. Together, we investigated the possibilities of publishing beyond and to collectively develop a broad and embodied idea of publishing.
Teaching project with the Dutch Art Institute, Laila Sit Aboha, Lilia Di Bella, Chiara Figone, Samira Ghoualmia, Leila Bencharnia, Kenjji Benjii, Emanuela Maltese, Savanna Morgan, Yon Natalie Mik, Iman Salem, Connor Schumacher, Annette RodriguezFiorillo, Antonia Rebekka Truninger, Astrée Duval, Clara von Schantz, Claudia Medeiros, Dalia Maini, Gamze Öztürk, Gloria Sogl, Jafar The Superstar, Julia von Schantz, Lena Pfäffli, Liam Warren, Louis Schou-Hansen, Noam Youngrak Son, Öykü Özgencil, Rex Collins, and Zoé Couppe.
“I don’t tell stories just to pass the time. It is the stories that come to me, inhabit me and transform me. I need to get them out of my body to free up overloaded boxes and receive new stories.” (The Sand Child, Taher Ben Jelloun)
Essential Reading
With a foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown, The Essential June Jordan allows new readers to discover – and old fans to rediscover – the vital work of this endlessly surprising poet who, in the words of Adrienne Rich, believed that ‘genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality.’
Some of Us Did Not Die brings together the seminal essays of June Jordan, the widely acclaimed Black American writer known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism. Spanning the length of her extraordinary career, and including her last writings, the essays in this collection reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of injustice, democracy, and literature. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence that resonates sharply to this day.
We Are Worth Fighting For is the first history of the 1989 Howard University protest. The three-day occupation of the university’s Administration Building was a continuation of the student movements of the sixties and a unique challenge to the politics of the eighties. Upset at the university’s appointment of the Republican strategist Lee Atwater to the Board of Trustees, students forced the issue by shutting down the operations of the university. The protest, inspired in part by the emergence of “conscious” hip hop, helped to build support for the idea of student governance and drew upon a resurgent black nationalist ethos.
As this book shows, abolitionism and feminism stand shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting a common cause: the end of the carceral state, with its key role in perpetuating violence, both public and private, in prisons, in police forces, and in people’s homes. Abolitionist theories and practices are at their most compelling when they are feminist; and a feminism that is also abolitionist is the most inclusive and persuasive version of feminism for these times.
In celebration of a decade of Poetry Meets — a collective expression of communal storytelling — Togetherness is our story unfolding: a dance, a call-and-response, a song, a prayer, a dream, a sweet memory, and a handful of (love) letters and pick-a-poem moments.
Times of isolation and reflection following the events of 2020, call for this poetic exploration of love and greif through the lens of black womanhood, Southern U.S.Americanness, and modernity.
Last poems from the national poet of Palestine. Mural is the testimony of one of the most important and powerful poets of our age.
