Secrets Under the Skin: Blurred Boundaries, Shifting Enactments, and Repositioning in Research-Based Dance in Ghana and Cuba

Abstract

This roundtable reflects on the processes of de-centering from multiple lenses and temporal placements inside the research and creative process. It is based on a collaborative, intermedia, and multitemporal contemporary performance/art installation informed by long-term ethnographic research of dance and ritual in Ghana and Cuba. Roundtable participants will excavate the process of conducting the research and creating the installation that continues to exhibit internationally at venues ranging from art galleries and libraries to rural research field sites. The installation offers a matrix of layered artistic exploration grounded in ethnographic inquiry that does not sit squarely inside a singular discipline. Inherently transdisciplinary, with multiple entanglements and porous boundaries, it offers “interpretive frictions” at the borders of ethnography, performance, material culture, research-based choreography, and embodiment of lived experience.