Towards Decolonial Choreographies of Co-Resistance

Abstract

This article engages movement as a methodology for understanding the creative coalition work that we carried out for a project series called Into the Light (ITL) that used research from university archives to mount a museum exhibition and then develop an interactive public education site that counters histories and ongoing realities of colonial eugenics and their exclusionary ideas of what it means to be human in Canada’s educational institutions. We address different movement practices, both those initiated by ableist-colonial forces to destroy difference and by our coalition of co-resistors to affirm difference. We apply a decolonizing and Anishinaabe philosophical lens alongside a feminist disability-informed neomaterialist and dance studies one to theorize examples of ITL’s “choreographies of co-resistance”. Anishinaabe knowledge practices refuse and thus interfere with colonial-eugenic practices of erasure while enacting an ethic of self-determination and mutual respect for difference. The ripple effect of this decolonizing and difference-affirming interference reverberates through our words and moves at varying tempos through our bodies—traveling through flesh, holding up at bones, and passing through watery, stretchy connective tissue pathways. These are our choreographies of co-resistance as actions of mattering and world-building.