Embodying Worldmakings: Bodies as/in migration Workshop

May 30th 2025
2pm – 6pm (BST)

Location: Large Rehearsal Room, Union Building, St Mary’s Place, St Andrews

Zoom Online Meeting, link here
Meeting ID: 844 3251 6339 Passcode: 236761

2:00 – 3:15pm
Session 1

Ballets, kin and wives: the social foundations of sabar artists’ careers in migration
Alice Aterianus-Owanga, University of Neuchâtel

‘¡Que me quiten lo bailado!’ Body work, global dance markets, and transnational mobilities
Ruxandra Ana, University of Łódź/University of St Andrews

Beyond Resilience: Embodied Power and Gestures of Freedom in Palestine
Ana Laura Rodríguez Quiñones, University of Neuchâtel

3:20 – 4:50pm
Session 2 & Discussion

From Tourism to Human Rights: DanceBrazil’s Embodied Messaging on the World Stage
Lucía M. Suárez, Iowa State University

Striving for Identity and Nationhood: Afro-Mexican Dance as a Vehicle for Cultural Representation and Community Transformation in Oaxaca and Veracruz, Mexico
Daniela Rodríguez Neira, University of St Andrews

Reflections on Flowing and Feeling with Fire Dancers in Thailand
Tiffany Pollock, York University

Discussion moderated by Stavroula Pipyrou, University of St Andrews

5:00 – 6:00pm
Dance Workshop: Thinking with/through our Bodies led by Daniela Rodríguez Neira, University of St Andrews

Ballets, kin and wives: the social foundations of sabar artists’ careers in migration

Sabar is a Senegalese music and dance genre that is now recognized and taught within various global music and dance networks (Neveu-Kringelbach 2013, Bizas 2014, Seye 2014), particularly within the African dance scene developing in cities across France and Switzerland (Aterianus-Owanga 2024). Unlike dance forms that circulate through cultural institutions and official channels (Despres 2016), the spread of sabar in European cities largely relies on extra-institutional and interpersonal networks, as well as informal mobility routes. Against a backdrop of closed borders and drastically reduced access to residence permits, the means of fulfilling aspirations to migrate and pursue a career in Europe have diminished — but this has not prevented the continued circulation, transmission, and reshaping of these dances. Drawing on long-term research within transnational sabar networks, and on a recently published book, this presentation will examine the chains, circuits, and channels that underlie the renewed possibilities of pursuing a career in Europe. I will highlight the crucial role played by three key social structures that both shape migration and the ways in which sabar is transmitted and adapted to new audiences: the solidarities formed in ballets prior to migration, kinship networks, and partnerships with European wives. In this highly gendered network, where migration is primarily accessible to male dancers, European wives function both as passports to migration and as essential “backup personnel” (Becker 1982) for the development and management of dancers’ careers (Despres 2016). I will underline how social foundations of dancers’ migrations reveal intersectional dynamics involving gender, race, and class — while further complicating them through the added dimension of the artistic and cultural capital owned by these artists and coveted by their students.

Alice Aterianus-Owanga, University of Neuchâtel is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Neuchâtel. Prior to that position, she realized a PhD thesis in anthropology at the University of Lyon 2; she was also a postdoctoral LAHIC at EHESS Paris, IFAS Johannesburg, University of Lausanne, University of Cape Town, and University of Geneva. During her PhD and postdoc research, she has worked on music (hip-hop), politics and identity in Gabon; on Senegalese dance circuits between Europe and Senegal; and on Afro-Latin dances in Cape Town. Her second single-authored book, published in 2024 by Paris Nanterre University Press, deals with the migrations and mobilities of Senegalese dancers and their students between Dakar and Europe. She has also directed four documentary films, and she uses documentary films as a means of ethnographic collaboration and dissemination of research.

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‘¡Que me quiten lo bailado!’ Body work, global dance markets, and transnational mobilities

In this talk I follow the stories of Cuban female dancers (in Cuba and in European contexts) in order address the emergence of flexible corporealities at the intersections of dance work and transnational mobilities. Dance, so often at the periphery of scholarly interest in Latin America and the Caribbean, provides us with fresh and valuable insights into the mechanisms through which artistic and embodied labor is extracted and commodified. Over the past three decades, developments in Cuban tourism brought along a multiplicity of interactions and affective ties between Cubans and international tourists, offering one of the few venues where class and citizenship disadvantage could be converted into social mobility. However, the hypersexualization of gendered and racialized bodies on the global dance market forces women to reassess how their bodies show up in the world/in the workplace. The legacy of the colonial project and the gendering processes associated to it are visible in women’s access to the labour market, their asylum requests, the affective products of care work in transnational perspective. The options available to many Cuban women on the European labor market oftentimes fall under the category of care/domestic work, dance work, or sex work, thus reinforcing notions of servitude, nurture, eroticism and hypersexualization as part of the “natural order” of the colonial gender system in Latin America and the Caribbean. Furthermore, migrant women’s multiple identities and belongings are subjected to processes of exclusion because of their gender, race, class, age, or sexual orientation, placing them in a precarious condition at the intersection of multiple axes of inequalities.

Ruxandra Ana, University of Łódź/University of St Andrews is an anthropologist whose research focuses on cultural heritage in relation to labor practices, entrepreneurship, migration, and social change in Cuba. Her doctoral and postdoctoral projects examined the commodification of bodily performances in touristic spaces and leisure spaces in migratory settings. She has published in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Dance Research Journal, Identities, Leisure Studies among others. Her work was funded by the Polish National Science Center and the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange. She is currently (2024–2026) a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, where she is conducting a study of the emotional landscapes of belonging through the lens of Cuban women’s embodied experiences and memories.

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Beyond Resilience: Embodied Power and Gestures of Freedom in Palestine

In contexts of prolonged occupation, racialized state violence, and forced displacement, Palestinian artistic expression is often framed through the lens of resilience or sumud (steadfastness). This presentation proposes a shift beyond resilience to examine how contemporary dance operates as a site of embodied power, where fear, fragmentation, and historical rupture are not only expressed but actively reworked through movement. Building on ethnographic encounters and the choreographic practices of Palestinian artists from diverse geographies, the analysis draws on affect theory and the anthropology of the body to explore how the translation of everyday gestures—repeated, transmitted, or imagined—into dance acts as both an archive of memory and a practice of freedom. These embodied gestures disrupt spatial and temporal boundaries, bridging intergenerational distances and resisting dominant narratives of passivity or victimhood. Through the reactivation of gesture and the somatic reworking of emotions and memory, dance emerges as a medium for reclaiming agency—not only over the self, but also over space and futurity. Ultimately, the talk considers how choreography becomes a political practice of imagination and rearticulation, offering new forms of collective subjectivity and presence under conditions of constraint.

Ana Laura Rodríguez Quiñones, University of Neuchâtel holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Lausanne. Her research explores the intersections of embodiment, affect, and the performing arts in the formation of political subjectivities within globalized and transnational contexts. Her doctoral work focused on the politics of contemporary dance in and about Palestine, drawing on multi-sited and digital ethnographic fieldwork conducted across Palestine, Israel, and several European countries. Through this research, she examined how bodily and performative practices mediate national and transnational forms of belonging, resistance, and representation within broader processes of globalization.

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From Tourism to Human Rights: DanceBrazil’s Embodied Messaging on the World Stage

In the early 1970s the state-sponsored tourist enterprise, Bahiatursa, highlighted Afro-Bahian traditions to bring attention to the splendors of Brazil’s Northeast, and specifically to the state of Bahia. This valuing of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous traditions (albeit not necessarily its people) was initiated during President Getúlio Vargas’ post-coup d’etat populist dictatorship (1937–45), which focused on carefully controlled nationalist projects. Vargas and his administration advanced an Estado Novo (New State) that crafted a national image of an ethno-culturally inclusive nation-state. Subsequently, numerous nationalistic projects were sponsored by the newly-inaugurated Department of News and Propaganda, including tourism and a growing network of entertainment. Bahiatursa cultivated “authenticity,” focusing on representations of uniquely Afro-Bahian culture—exemplified by Afro-Bahian rhythms, dances of the orixas, and capoeira—that aimed to provide a sense of origin and originality from a source that was presented as fixed, even though that codified representation was ultimately an artificial projection. Half a century later, dancers whose lives were changed by this tourist enterprise challenge these representations of nation through choreographies that draw on embodied experiences, knowledge, and consequent representation to expose the global effects of poverty. Examining two choreographies, Pivete and Fe do Sertão, I analyze how Jelon’s Brazil bares poverty as central to the reality of the Brazilian nation, and how performance connects and activates youths internationally to engage in human rights through embodied practices.

Lucía M. Suárez, Iowa State University is Associate Professor and Director of Latino/a studies in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Iowa State University. She has written and taught extensively on the literary production of the Caribbean and its Diaspora authors, claiming their islands and framing their identities through memory and emotion, within a human rights context. Through her research, writing and teaching, she examines the politics of belonging and exclusion, more specifically the dynamics of social mobility through the arts, literature, literacy, dance and performance. Dr. Suárez focuses on Cuban and Cuban-American identity and memory, the cultural production of the Comparative-Caribbean, Latina/o/x life narratives, social mobility and cultural survival through Afro-Brazilian dance and performance.

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Striving for Identity and Nationhood: Afro-Mexican Dance as a Vehicle for Cultural Representation and Community Transformation in Oaxaca and Veracruz, Mexico

This presentation is based on my PhD research proposal. Drawing on regional and theoretical literature reviews, I will explore how Afromexicans from Oaxaca and Veracruz in southern Mexico rediscover and embrace their identity and sense of belonging through dance practices. Since the Mexican Revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, the nation-state has neglected the stories, culture, and dance practices of Afromexican communities (Laviña 1994: 98). Instead, it has privileged the idea of indigenous dance practices as a symbol of being Mexican. Only recently, there has been an interest in including the voices of Afro-Mexican communities in this conversation about national identity (Lewis 2005). Additionally, existing dance ethnographies in Mexico have overlooked the corporeal traditions of these communities and, particularly, the perspectives of dancers on how their practices shape and foster collective identities. This research project aims to enhance the existing literature related to Afromexican communities. Firstly, excluding their dances from the classification of national folk dances has had a detrimental impact on these practices and has denied their African roots. Today, embracing these dances as an integral part of Afro heritage is crucial for reviving and rediscovering identity within these communities. Secondly, there has been insufficient anthropological focus on these communities from a dance perspective. Moreover, there are currently no academic works that simultaneously explore the dynamics of Afromexican communities on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of the country, which would help to better understand the differences and similarities between the communities in these regions.

Daniela Rodríguez Neira, University of St Andrews is a first-year PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She holds a master’s degree in the Anthropology of Dance and Ethnochoreology, part of the Erasmus+ Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s degree (EMJMD) Choreomundus – International Master in Dance Knowledge, Practice, and Heritage. Additionally, she is a professional dancer with over 10 years of experience in Latin styles and street dance. She has conducted research on salsa, street dance, and folklore in South America and the Caribbean, specifically in Colombia, Mexico, and Jamaica.

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Reflections on Flowing and Feeling with Fire Dancers in Thailand

This paper reflects on the entanglement of embodiment and affect in ethnographic research with fire dancers in Southern Thailand’s tourism industry. I explore my embodied learning with dancers, and my attempts to attune to the affects that structure their worlds and their artistry. Central to fire dancers’ art form is the cultivation of “flow” – a bodily experience and aesthetic – and the generation of particular energies felt through flowing. I analyze how my gendered embodiment influenced my movement through spaces with fire dancers and my learning to sense and feel in new ways. The felt experiences and affects in fieldwork created opportunities for different bodily relationalities, including the sharing of embodied knowledge, but moments of rupture and disconnect. This discussion proposes “flow” as an affective methodology to support considerations of the relational nature of researchers’ engagements in the field, and contributes to broader discussions on dance research, embodied ethnography, and affect studies.

Tiffany Pollock, York University holds a PhD in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies and an MA in Ethnomusicology. Her ethnographic research in Thailand and Canada has centred on the intersections of music, dance, labor and migration. Her work considers how music and dance, as social practices, provide avenues for people to contend with social, cultural and political life. She is the author of Fire Dancers in Thailand’s Tourism Industry: Art, Affect, and Labour (Cornell University Press 2024). This ethnography explores the transformation of fire dancing from informal community gatherings to iconic tourist performances, emphasizing the role of affect in the lives of fire dancers.

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Dance Workshop: Thinking with/through our Bodies

This practical workshop invites participants to embody the idea of knowing through movement. It is an experimental journey that encourages the exploration of alternative ways to engage with the richness of everyday life experiences. Participants will explore how to connect with their feelings, thoughts, ideas, and memories while forging connections within their community and reflecting on their political, social, and economic contexts. No prior experience in dance is needed; all that is required is a willingness to learn and connect through our bodies. It is open to all who are eager to engage with movement as a powerful means of thinking and understanding the diverse realities around us.