Finding Ceremony. Dancing nearby the Guardians of San Words and Worlds

This paper, presented by choreographer, dancer and artist Moya Michael and dramaturg and researcher Joachim Ben Yakoub, examines our collaborative artistic research for the sculpturance It is like a Finger Pointing a Way to the Moon, co-produced by KVS and Wiels in Brussels in 2024. Departing from Moya Michael’s artistic journey in performing arts, searching for relations with her San lineage and ancestrality, this research explores the power of movement, sculptural installation, storytelling and transmission. The San people are historically the most over-researched Indigenous people. They were also the first target of colonial efforts to erase Indigenous knowledge systems, and ways of moving and being in the world. Ways of relating and co-labouring with these communities are in dire need of re-invention. Reflecting on our distinct roles as choreographer and dancer on the one hand, and dramaturg and storyteller on the other, we will account for the various reasons why our artistic research refuses the frame of extinction shaped by anthropology, and the impulse to understand artists as ethnographers. These refusals aim to be generative and make space for the idea of transformation as a way of continuation, by finding ceremony, dancing nearby the guardians of words and worlds. Making kin with the San in Namibia, it explores ways of finding ceremony and dancing nearby through embodied listening, all the while diffracting the ethnographic, modern and colonial gaze, undoing their stereotypes and embedded forms of violence. This research hopes to inspire methodological conversations on ways to overcome historical power relations and doing justice to all the lifeforms dwelling in their cosmovision, but also impact the debates on collaboration in artistic research, on dance, movement, and gesture as minoritised or endangered embodied knowledges, and in this ways prop