[Focus on Nyota Inyoka]

The following articles by Amanda Piña, Sandra Chatterjee and Franz Anton Cramer give an account of experiences and insights collected in the interdisciplinary one-year project Contemporary Reflections on Nyota Inyoka. It was part of, and embedded in, the four-year research project Border-Dancing Across Time. The (forgotten) Parisian choreographer Nyota Inyoka, her oeuvre, and questions of choreographing créolité. This latter one, introduced in MAP #11[1] is hosted at the Department of Music and Dance at Paris Lodron University Salzburg, Austria and receives funding since 2019 by FWF (Austrian Science Fund).

Contemporary Reflections, in turn, was supported by the French Centre national de la Danse (CN D; French National Centre for Dance) as part of the funding scheme “Aide à la recherche et au patrimoine en danse” between 2020 and 2021. It brought together artists, researchers and artist-researchers alike in various formats.[2]

The principal collective research phases were a one-week laboratory in Vienna at the invitation of, and with additional support by, Tanzquartier Wien, as well as a one-week workshop in Paris at the National Library to examine the written and graphic documents by Nyota Inyoka, which were at the basis of the research. Further in-depth investigations were enabled by the CHAKKARs — Moving Interventions initiative in Munich[3]. The full details of this diverse programmation are documented at https://project-nyota-inyoka.sbg.ac.at/activities/news/contemporary-reflections-on-nyota-inyoka/.

[1] See http://www.perfomap.de/map11/werk-geschichten/nyota-inyoka-biographie-archiv.

[2] Participants were Lina Venegas, Linda Samaraweerová, Eike Wittrock, Amanda Piña as well as the FWF research team (Sandra Chatterjee, Christina Gillinger-Correa Vivar, Gerrit Berenike Heiter) and Franz Anton Cramer.

[3] See https://chakkars.de/portfolio-item/forgotten-dancers-forgotten-archives-iii/.