sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

agency moving beyond polarization, then dance truly is a full mode of feminist expression and
intervention, whose potential has yet to be acknowledged in the academics, in arts and in the
feminist movements. Engaging our reflection and connecting our intuition to the three solos
discussed in this paper, we can move with the performer between past, present and future, which
merge into the timeless instant of the performance. Watching and sensing Oxana Chi dance, the
audience walks along powerful dancescapes, uncovering the borderless mapping of facts and
feelings. In the short frame of this paper, I could only lightly touch upon Oxana's rich and complex art
always supported by mind‐blowing live‐music. Audiences speeding up and slowing down to the
dancer's energetic pace, clinging to aerial gravity, shivering and wondering through the gardens of
exile...writing is far from reaching what we can perceive live...
Keywords: Dance, Memory, Auto/biographical storytelling, Cultural studies, Feminism
Layla Zami
mail@laylazami.net
www.laylazami.net
ELES Foundation / Cultural & Gender Studies, Humboldt‐University Berlin
Notes
1 All personal communications by Oxana Chi cited in this paper were recorded in a videotaped
interview conducted in Berlin 2013 in the frame of my PhD research, when not otherwise
mentioned. I translated into English the original German‐speaking version. See Dance videos on
Oxana Chis' website : http://oxanachi.de All websites cited in this paper were accessed June 1st,
2014.
I thank Natasha Kelly for proof‐reading this paper.
2
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar about dancer Pearl Primus, quoted in Nadine George‐Graves, Urban
Bush Women ‐ Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater, Community Engagement, and
Working It Out, Studies in Dance History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 203.
3
For a great critique of androcentrism and feminism see lann hornscheidt and Oyèrónkẹ́
Oyěwùmí. I will not go into their discussion in the frame of this paper, however I wish to mention
that my understanding of women here is not a biological one, but the result of a social
construction which serves discursive and material oppression interconnected with racism,
classism and ableism.
4 Nadine George‐Graves, Urban Bush Women ‐ Twenty Years of African American Dance Theater,
Community Engagement, and Working It Out, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 4‐
6.
5 María do Mar Castro Varela and Nikita Dhawan, “Europa Provinzialisieren? Ja, Bitte! Aber Wie?,”
Femina Politica 2, no. 2009 (2009): 2.
6 Amina Mama, Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 1995), 14.
7
Grada Kilomba, Plantation Memories. Episodes of Everyday Racism (Münster: UNRAST‐Verlag,
2008), 31.
8
Oxana Chi, Personal Communication, 2013.
9
I emphasize "history" to question the usual Western understanding of a linear space‐time
progression.
10
I understand "diasporic", following Michelle Wright and fatima eL‐tayeb, as the "strategy of
claiming a space within the nation by moving beyond it [defined by sharing] "a contemporary
condition" [rather than sharing] "original roots." see fatima eL‐tayeb, European Others : Queering
Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxxiv.
11
George‐Graves, Urban Bush Women, xi. The author has been following the company for 15
years ! See also Uma Narayan about the epistemic advantage, Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks
about situated knowledge and the outsider‐within status, and in dance studies Brenda Dixon‐
Gottshild about the insight gained from writing about topics which you experience yourself as a
subject.
12
Here I follow Omise'eke's definition of queer not (only) as a sexual identity but as "as a praxis