Still dancing!

12 channel Videoinstallation

When I went to film the amateur dance group Gayané in
Buenos Aires (2013), I had my prejudices: I thought, why are these forty youngsters meeting every week to dance hundred years later, 10.000 km away, the same Armenian dances as their great grandparents without changing the choreography, or the minder movement? I thought, “these guys are stubborn, they are stuck in place and time.”
After being there for a while and interviewing some of them, I understood that I was wrong: in their movements there is resistance, they share the desire to enjoy togetherness and experience something that goes beyond language, something inherent to the body, reminiscences of an intact body. They perform a wish to restore justice. Later I developed this 14-channel installation with images of the Armenian Diaspora dancing in Toronto, Sidney, Beirut, Washington, Lyon, Buenos Aires, Yerevan…
Movements as abstract resistance against forgetting: gestures and sequences of movements that keep a soul, they remember us how it was to be an entire body.
Dancing as resistance manifested this summer in Yerevan when people went out to the streets to protest against the hiking of electricity. The crowd used the slogan #electric-
yerevan and the dancing practice to get their voice heard. This experience has potential for a future if we dare to use these movements without sacralizing nor the movements, nor the experience where they come from.

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© Silvina Der Meguerditchian