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also in a horizontal, present tense of affinities." 40 Just as her breath connects the movements to each
other, she connects events and biographies rather than comparing them. The metaphorical spaces of
representation reclaimed by Oxana Chi are physically invested on stage. Grace, flexibility, and strength
are not only metaphorical as in Chela Sandoval's "differential consciousness" 41 , they are physically
supporting the dancer's expression. Fusing ballet pirouettes with Senegalese jumps, explosive Kung
Fu‐like kicks with slow Javanese hand grace Through Gardens is very emblematic of what I call
perforMemory. The multi‐directionality of memory 42 happening on stage is three‐dimensional.
Inspired by "digging out" a photograph representing Tatjana Barbakoff holding a Wayang Kulit (an
object which Oxana encountered in Solo where she learned Javanese dances) she zigzags across the
stage in the fashion of the Indonesian Wayang Kulit Puppet to tell Tatjana Barbakoff's dreamed travels
from China to Europe and her real travel from Latvia to Germany to France, from newspaper covers to
Auschwitz gas chambers.
Moving beyond: Turning, Crossing, Transforming
Oxana Chi's art should be perceived holistically by the audience, from her stepping into airy Afro‐
German spaces, over her dignified way of blowing life back into the statue of Nefertiti, to her
wandering through circular time‐space narrative of an ever‐present European Holocaust. It works
towards countering “the static doneness of historical documentation, lifting the black and white
printing off the page and imbuing it with the ability to move, shift, and, finally, to transform
itself.” 43 Despite the intense seriousness Oxana puts into dealing with tragic past and present power
relations, her dance is accompanied by an infinite tenderness, a deep humor, inevitable melancholia,
and an ever present horizon of hope. The three pieces discussed here turn perspectives around as the
dancer executes pirouettes and sufi twists. Infusing the stage with the power to represent oneself
and to share this representation with the audience, she invites us to move beyond the very idea of
representation.
Dance goes very deep as the performer is requested to flip one's self inside out. Transposing the
space of the margin to the center of the stage, dancers may transform the center into an "inspirited
topography". 44 Crossing boundaries across the stage, Oxana shifts spaces, temporalities and
meanings around. This also happens geographically, for instance when Oxana performed Through
Gardens in front of a 5,000 audience at the international open‐air festival SIPA 2010 (Java, Indonesia).
The outstanding reception by the audience and local press challenges trendy islamophobic discourses
about antisemitism, bearing witness of the polysemous potential of her individual embodied memory
to appeal to people across national, religious and gendered divides. Emotions are in motion when
Oxana slides on stage between those memories and moves them through space and time as she
performs in various venues across the globe. Jumping across the stage in Neferet iti, incorporating a
female warrior, her moves consciously break down rigid linear narratives and build up new
possibilities to relate to history. The dancer rejects any attempt to confine memory within a museum
space. Filling the stage as she fills up the blanks of history, Oxana's art inspires a transformative spirit
which can ultimately heal wounds.
Dancescapes
We are on a vulcano, and we are a vulcano.
On the margin of borders, we are borderless.
In questions without answers, we are the question. We are the answer (...).
We exist, we ask, we reclaim, we contest, we question history's questions and we tame
history's pain. 45
Western academia has continuously enforced a dichotomous split between constructed categories
such as mind/body, women/men, culture/nature, subjective /objective, emotional/rational,
home/other, past/present. If feminism is the re‐appropriation by self‐asserted subjects of their own