Somatic Sauce 2020 – annotating Love Therapy and celebration

ABSTRACT Using Motion Bank’s web-based annotation and publication tools, dance educator Amelia Uzategui Bonilla engages in remote collaboration with international colleagues in times of Corona. They share a praxis in vernacular dance languages, in this case those with African and Indigenous influences from Latin American. This document details a decolonial dance documentation approach featuring recorded classes and interviews with Alberto Barrios, based in Bogota, Colombia and Carmen Román from Oakland, California. Román dances Festejo, a dance cultivated by Peru’s African descendants. Barrios dances Champeta, a genre developed in the 1980s in Cartagena. Their analysis and discussion gain insights on these complex movement forms and the knowledges they contain. A supplementary webpage includes annotated videos of their online classes and conversations on the basis of these. Practice-specific verbalization identifies a lexicon constructed from imagery related to social, political and natural environments. The combination of audiovisual and written material in this document and its corresponding website demonstrates their approach to teaching dances rooted in Black and Indigenous cultures. It also speaks to the potential of documenting dance collaborations during the COVID-19 Quarantine.