Breathing Rivers: Frontera / Procesión – Un Ritual de Agua

Based on this basic attitude, the Mexican-Chilean-Austrian choreographer Amanda Piña developed “Frontera / Procesión – Un Ritual de Água” (Border / Procession – A Ritual of Water), a performance that takes hip-hop, colonial history, indigenous practices and Mysticism reveals a struggle against oppression and dispossession.

The performance will be presented in mid-July as part of the "Breathing Rivers" festival at Radialsystem.

The performance is part of Piña's long-term project "Endangered Human Movements", which deals with centuries-old dances and forms of movement that are threatened with disappearance. "Frontera / Procesión - Un Ritual de Água" is based on a street dance, usually performed by men, that originated in the El Ejido Veinte neighborhood of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, on the border between Mexico and the United States - a border town on the Rio Grande, characterized by violence, drug trafficking, militarization and cheap labour.

The dance is part of the so-called "Danzas de Conquista" (Dances of Conquest): Originally conceived by the Spanish crown to represent the Christian victory over the Moors on the Iberian Peninsula, it was also used in Latin America as a racist propaganda tool. Over the centuries, the meaning of the dance has changed towards a "Danza de Frontera" - a dance that expresses resistance, "reconquest" and self-determination.

In "Frontera / Procesión - Un Ritual de Água" Amanda Piña works with artists from her own company, which is part of "Danza y Frontera", as well as professional and non-professional dancers from Berlin - with the aim of promoting solidarity with and strengthen between women. "Un Ritual de Água" sees itself as a kind of manifesto - one that envisions a feminist political order through which our future can be nurtured and regenerated.

Breathing Rivers Festival

Located on the Spree, the Radialsystem was originally one of Berlin's first pumping stations and in the late 19th century it channeled the sewage from the rapidly growing city. As part of the "Breathing Rivers" summer festival, today's radial system will be examined from 20.-23. July 2023 our relationship with nature and water with works by the choreographers Amanda Piña, Lina Gómez and Luísa Saraiva. The "Breathing Rivers" festival opens up spaces of experience in which we can collectively remember a connection between all living things that has been disrupted by the thinking and actions of European modernity. Fractures between man and nature, body and mind, or also dividing categorizations such as gender and race - fractures against the background of which violence and exploitation are justified.

The return to the inseparable connection of human beings in a larger context begins here with the body as a place of experience. Instead of the idea of universal knowledge, "Breathing Rivers" proposes a multitude of possibilities for knowledge production that arises with and from the reality of differently situated bodies.