http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/ucr_chass_dance_oapolicydeposits/rss Recent eScholarship items from Department of Dance Open Access Policy Deposits Sat, 27 Jun 2026 09:35:24 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97t161ft Necropower often relies on taxonomic distinctions between self and Other, a binary structure that is associated with gender binarism, digital dualism, and negations of life’s entanglement with death. This essay discusses deployments of paradox against these necropolitical binaries by Lukas Avendaño, a Binni Zaa (Zapotec) and muxe (nonbinary gender) artist and anthropologist, and Muxx Project, an artistic collective founded in 2020 by Avendaño and multimedia artists EYIBRA, Óldo Erréve, and Nnux. The essay’s “dialogical body” traces Avendaño and Muxx Project’s understandings of how their body-based and digital performances attempt to disrupt gender binarism and digital dualism, to then focus on Avendaño’s paradoxical view of life and death forged through artistic practice, and, most importantly, his experience as an activist confronting the complexities of necropower in contemporary Mexican politics. Following Avendaño’s theorization of the ouroboros as an embodiment of life’s... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/97t161ft Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Firmino-Castillo, María Regina https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1446-6242 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9561h18j RUXIMIK QAK’U’X: Inextricable Relationalities in Mayan Performance Practice, a Dialogical Co-Theorization with Daniel Fernando Guarcax González and Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9561h18j Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Firmino-Castillo, Maria https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1446-6242 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7st5z0sp Drawing from Freya Mathews and Mario Blaser’s critiques of genocide, modernity, and coloniality, in addition to the unpublished writings of Raphaël Lemkin on colonialism, this study interrogates three ontological tenets associated with genocidal coloniality: that some persons are things, that matter is inert, and that some humans are autonomous of an ecological matrix. The author examines these tenets through the lens of Guatemala’s recent counter-insurgency war (1960—1996), focusing on the genocide against Ixil Maya communities during the height of the war (approximately 1979-1985). The author draws from work on collective art-based projects in Nab’aa’, Guatemala to examine how embodied performances of the inextricable relational ties between human and other-than-human persons and entities in an agentive and person-filled material world posed insistent challenges to genocidal coloniality’s three tenets. Three moments of performance, ranging from the quotidian to the ceremonial... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7st5z0sp Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Firmino-Castillo, María Regina https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1446-6242 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/758119s8 The Disappeared of Xibalbá: Bodily Remembrances of the "Xibalbay" by Lukas Avendaño https://escholarship.org/uc/item/758119s8 Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Firmino-Castillo, Maria https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1446-6242 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5953m22q The Refusal to be Disappeared: Lukas Avendaño’s Xibalbay https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5953m22q Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Firmino-Castillo, Maria https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1446-6242 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1qf8672p A collective essay that looks at movement in a place comprising what is now known as Mesoamerica or Central America, Mexico as well as parts of California and the southwestern United States. After elucidating how the violence of modernity/coloniality creates regimes of knowledge, aesthetics, and politics that deny corporeal self-determination, the authors offer varied, but interconnected, approaches to “transmotion” as embodied practices that generate relational sovereignties despite the ongoing violence visited upon persons in movement, especially at the artificial borders between the geopolitical bodies comprising Mesoamerica. The authors’ three voices relationally build upon each other to trace the complexities at the heart of decolonization, especially in regards to the diasporic, the dispossessed, and the displaced. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1qf8672p Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Firmino Castillo, María Regina Guarcax González, Daniel Fernando Brito Bernal, Tohil Fidel Firmino-Castillo, María Regina https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1446-6242 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0jh966m8 Les desaparecides de Xibalbá: remembranzas corporales del "Xibalbay" de Lukas Avendaño https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0jh966m8 Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 Firmino-Castillo, Maria Regina https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1446-6242 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6f90f7q4 Esta colaboración entre los tres autores consiste en un conjunto de “destellos” (yuxtaposiciones críticas) sobre las “transmociones sui generis”que  Gerald  Vizenor definió  como  el  derecho  inherente  al movimiento. Analizando los mecanismos y lógicas de la destrucción corpo-ontológica  en Mesoamérica,   se   nombran   las   relaciones sociológicas distintas entre los tres autores y como estas dan forma a la colaboración. Guarcax González narra detalles de su práctica en sonido/movimiento con  Grupo  Sotzil,  mientras  que  Brito  Bernal interroga    el    récord    arqueológico    en    cuanto    la    danza    en Centroamérica   para   reflexionar   sobre   sus   propósitos.   Firmino-Castillo  concluye  presentando  proyectos  de  movimiento  desde... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6f90f7q4 Thu, 21 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Firmino-Castillo, María Regina https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1446-6242 González, Daniel Fernando Guarcax Brito Bernal, TOHIL Fidel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0xs422fv Ruximik Qak'u'x: Relacionalidades Ineludibles en el Arte Escenico De Grupo Sotz'il / Inescapable Relationalities in Grupo Sotz'il’s Performance Practice https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0xs422fv Thu, 21 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 Castillo, María Regina Firmino González, Daniel Fernando Guarcax Bernal, Tohil Fidel Fidel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0b94k812 This article discusses ways that Indigenous dance is an ontological praxis that is embodied and telluric, meaning “of the earth.” It looks at how dancing bodies perform in relationship to ecosystems and entities within them, producing ontological distinctions and hierarchies that are often imbued with power. This makes dance a site of ontological struggle that potentially challenges the delusional ontological universality undergirding imperialism, genocide, and ecocide. The author explores these theoretical propositions through her participation in Oxlaval Q'anil, an emerging Ixil Maya dance project in Guatemala, and Dancing Earth, an itinerant and inter-tribal U.S.-based company founded by Rulan Tangen eleven years ago. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0b94k812 Tue, 28 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 Castillo, María Regina Firmino