Frontera / Procesión – Un Ritual de Agua: Performance by Amanda Piña

Breathing Rivers: Frontera / Procesión – Un Ritual de Agua

Water in our bodies and in our environment clears a path for new forms of solidarity that saturates all notions of borders, whether cultural, national or aesthetic. Based on this approach, Mexican-Chilean-Austrian artist Amanda Piña has developed ‘Frontera/Procesión – Un Ritual de Agua’ (Border/Procession – A Ritual of Water), a performance that reveals a struggle against oppression and dispossession alongside hip-hop, colonial history, indigenous practices and mysticism.

The performance is part of Piña's long-term project ‘Endangered Human Movements’, which explores centuries-old dances and forms of movement that are in danger of disappearing. ‘Frontera/Procesión – Un Ritual de Agua’ is based on a street dance – developed by Rodrigo de la Torre – that is usually performed by men, and which originated in the El Ejido Veinte neighbourhood of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, on the border of Mexico and the United States. A border town on the Rio Grande marked 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 as a racist propaganda tool in Abya Yala (a pre-colonial name of the American continent), but, over the centuries, the meaning of the dance has changed to a “Danza de Frontera” – a dance expressing resistance, "reconquest" and self-determination. For Amanda Piña, the border is not just a place, but a sign inscribed in bodies: a sign against any colonial paradigm of universalism shared only by those who embody a common history of oppression.

In „Frontera/Procesión – Un Ritual de Agua" Amanda Piña worked 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 strengthening solidarity with and between women.