What bodies remember: Dance, affect, and the Dutch colonial past

This article reports on a research project that we built around a dance theatre work to (1) bring bodily affectivity concerning the Dutch colonial slavery past into focal awareness; (2) survey the entanglement of mind, body, and world; and (3) explore dance/movement arts’ potential as ‘social medicine’. Farida Nabibaks’ Margaretha brings together a Euro-Western and an Africana (African and African-Caribbean diaspora) lineage of dance practice and philosophy. Performed at Castle Cannenburch (Gelderland) and combined with a guided movement workshop, the performance and accompanying exercises generated an understanding among the recruited volunteer participants of how the colonial past endures within bodies while creating a sense of what healing might feel like through attention to the body and bodily affectivity. Facilitating the exploration of the incorporations and (bodily) manifestations of a traumatic historical past, dance/movement arts, we submit, is a dynamic of shared enactment that may assist in healing the colonial wound.