Rafael Palacios (Sankofa Danzafro): I remember that when I was little I always liked dancing. I would hide in a room in my house in order to dance and I would hide because I didn’t want my parents, my siblings and relatives to see. I felt embarrassed. For a long time I hid away and danced in a dark room. I would turn on the radio and that gave me a lot of joy and happiness.

[As time went by], I realised that the joy and happiness I had as a child was disappearing because I had to spend time – in order to dance in front of everyone – creating a dignified space for myself: I mean, fighting against all those stereotypes that form around a Black man who danced. The eroticism, the exoticisation, the belief that for us dance is something easy. And this is not true because in reality dance is a discipline that we have to study in a very dedicated way. So, what began as a feeling of joy ended up being the power to communicate with the rest of the world and creating a space of struggle. I believe that this is where dance and its practice becomes an anti-racist political space. I discovered that, through dance, which gave me enjoyment, I could also express my pain, my nonconformity, my protests, my struggles as a [Black] man in the world, struggles to reclaim my humanity, which they always wanted to take away from me.

Andrea Bonilla (Sankofa Danzafro): Anti-racism in dance has to do with the importance of recognising history so we can move through time with self-awareness and coherence. It is about recognising the past and the history that we have been denied but which are present in our voices and in our bodies [when we dance]. As Yndira says, you don’t necessarily have to verbalise [that you are anti-racist] for it to be possible. There is action in the body and thought. I like to use another term that I am working on and that is acuerpar [to embody]. Anti-racist thinking is embodied through dance itself. It is an active voice that constantly deliberates in an Afro-centred way. That’s why I don’t know if anti-racism has to be against, because sometimes I ask, ‘Is it against being in a place?’ I prefer to think of Afro-centring as an anti-racist stance.

Loretta Meneses (Colectivo Aguaturbia): To answer this question, first I want to share something about the collective voice that we built in Aguaturbia. Aguaturbia was a collective of Black artists that was formed in Bogotá from 2015, 2016 onwards. Although we are now seven people, before we were twelve. There were poets, visual producers, dancers, and actresses, musicians, writers, visual arts and others. We decided to call ourselves Aguaturbia because of the experience of a friend, Paola Lucumí, who was doing her undergraduate research work. She is the daughter of a mestizo woman and her father is Black and, let’s say, she did not grow up with her paternal family. And in her search in [the] Cauca [region], for her paternal family, they told her that she was not from there, nor from here [Bogotá]: she was ‘muddy water’. That experience generated some illustrations and Wilson Borja, another artist in Aguaturbia, who is an animator and illustrator, captured all those reflections in some illustrated stories entitled Color piel [Skin Colour].

[Through that experience] we realised that we were the Black people in Bogotá, the Black artists who wanted to disrupt Bogotá.Footnote ¹ We had experienced racism incidents throughout our lives. We called this project anti-racist because Bogotá as the economic, political and cultural centre of the country is configured as a place founded on a deep legacy of racism and colonisation. So Aguaturbia was born with the aim of challenging this racism by making visible, promoting and positioning the artistic production and intellectual perspectives of Black, Afro-descendant, Raizal and Palenquero people, etc., who make up the social fabric of the city.Footnote ² [We wanted to] develop our own language and question the concept of race, gender, territory, using our bodies as referents in these places [in Bogotá]. Finally, we wanted to address issues [such as racism] to bring them into artistic projects in the city.

Peter Wade: When you put the body on stage as an instrument of expression you also expose it to violence, which you are trying to challenge. How do you respond to this ambivalent status, to the mixed emotions that the body as an instrument, as a technique, can produce when used in anti-racism?

Andrea Bonilla (Sankofa Danzafro): Well, I don’t see the body as an instrument, because to see the body as an instrument is to locate it outside of [oneself], [it means] not to inhabit myself, and I think that precisely what happens to us with dance and with art is that we stop being an instrument and become a place, become action. [So] there is a change in that paradigm, in that way of seeing and conceiving the body. The West has taught us to see the body in terms of pain and pleasure, two very marketable locations, but when dance and art allow us to create, to live, to experiment, to bring our voice, to bring our emotions and to be, it is then [that] a different state [of things], an anti-racist state, is produced.

You were talking about the danger of the body falling into spectacularisation and exoticisation. We could always say that, yes, that does happen. For me as a Black woman, Sankofa has strengthened me a lot. I also do capoeira from Angola (the most traditional type of capoeira), which is also a home place for me. It is called Nzinga de Capoeira Angola. That is a place that I have as a Black woman, it is another place, a place that is not socially expected, and since that [place] does not get dislocated, I don’t have to act out seductive scenes, [for example,] which were very commonplace for Black women in dance before I entered Sankofa.

Peter Wade: In your interventions, you always relate the work you do to ‘the territory’: anti-racist artistic practice and territory. How would you explain what territory is to people who don’t know Colombia? How does it relate to an anti-racist stance?

Laura Asprilla Carrillo (Aguaturbia Collective): I was born and raised in Bogotá. The collective was created in Bogotá and the meeting of the Afro Radical Imagination [IRA] was held in Bogotáv in 2016. So, the IRA allowed us to get a feeling of the territory in Bogotá. The interesting thing is that, despite being born and raised in Bogotá, one perhaps does not recognise Bogotá as the territory. In terms of defining what a territory is, Bogotá is also a territory, but Black people born in Bogotá think of territory more as the place where our parents were born, as the places where the [Black] population is concentrated, not only in cities like Bogotá or Cali or Medellín.Footnote ³ We think of territory not as the place where I grew up, where I was born, but as the place where I identify with my ancestors, with mother earth, with my true customs.

Yndira Perea (Sankofa Danzafro): The territory is the place that saw us grow. Being in Tumaco [creating and rehearsing the work Detrás del sur: Danzas para Manuel] was the best thing that could have happened to us during those moments that were difficult for everyone because of the pandemic.Footnote ⁴ Although they were very exhausting days, because the work was hard – all day dancing, reflecting on the bookFootnote ⁵ – I think we enjoyed it very much and that the territory had a lot to do with it. I had a shoulder injury and I forgot all about it. I mean, I don’t know at what point it got better. Dance also heals us, the territory also allows us to create in a different way, it allows us to be inspired. I think that getting to the territory and connecting with the people, with their history, seeing the resistance of these people also helps us. It allows us to create in a different way.

Rafael Palacios (Sankofa Danzafro): Well, I believe that all human beings like to dance, we like to move the body to a rhythm, a song, a memory, a silence – and that makes us feel good. Just as I was telling you that when I was little, I felt good when I danced, [so] to feel good is to be healthy. But I also believe that there are many dances, specifically for us Afro-descendants, that have ridiculed us, dances that have eroticised and exoticised us. That is the specific case, for example, of the performance of mapalé with a loincloth.Footnote ⁶ This is a dance that caricatures us, that makes us look like beings who are only thinking about sexual pleasure and I believe that this also hurts and sickens a community. So when we on stage, we undo that image, we do away with that stereotype. When we get together to dance with each other and to say this is how we want to narrate ourselves, on the basis of the right to feel good, to feel happy, to want to share an emotion through dance – this is when dance heals the body. So, I would say that dance heals and heals us in a very profound way.