S2E2 introducing Stéphanie Janaina

This is the second episode of the second season of the LACE Symposium podcast, the official podcast of the LACE Symposium for Dance and Other Contemporary Practices.

In this episode, Deirdre Morris (she/they)—artist, body worker, and curator of the LACE Symposium—talks to Stéphanie Janaina (she/her) about working in the heat, about sighing, the rhythms and melodies of everyday sounds, like the sound of a keyboard and the click of a mouse.

Deirdre and Stéphanie talk about experimenting with words, taking care of words, and the power of words, particularly about the ability words have to evoke emotions and experiences. They discuss the impact of words on individuals, emphasizing the importance of understanding and redefining personal definitions of words like “violence” and “fragility.”

Listening to their conversation, I—pavleheidler (they/them), host of the podcast and curator of the LACE Symposium—get a sense of intimate personhood emerging in the aura surrounding words, something like a sense of “wordial” agency. Words, as I’m imagining them right now, are messengers, helping us communicate with each other across temporal and spatial boundaries .

Stéphanie works with the body, memory, and language as territories where identity is both affirmed and unsettled. Through performance, she explores ways of inhabiting other languages and making visible what has been silenced by history or violence. In her work, the body becomes archive and bridge, holding memory and imagining more sensitive modes of existing together. She studies the Mixtec language, variant Tnu’u Dau, as a choreographic and affective device: a way of keeping alive the dialogue with her grandmother and with a collective history.

Having contributed to LACE #2: Mediating Touch, this is Stéphanie’s second contribution to the LACE Symposium.

Stéphanie’s contribution to LACE #4: Fractalising Touch, entitled Composted Identities, will take place on the 28th of July, a Tuesday, at 2.30PM.

The LACE Symposium is curated by Deirdre Morris (she/they), Sylvia Scheidl (she/her), and pavleheidler (they/them). LACE #4 is made in partnership with PART International Residency Austria, and ImPulsTanz — Vienna International Dance Festival!

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or OeAD-GmbH. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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