Echoes and whispers: re-narrating the memory of dance in Quito, Ecuador

Abstract

In this article, I revisit an archive of interviews to dance practitioners in Quito-Ecuador between 2013 and 2014. During the interviews, the dancers were asked to talk about their own artistic trajectories, and about ways in which they would name and categorize their own work. They were also asked to give a definition of contemporary dance in their own words. When this question came up, a good number of the interviewees were unsure and doubtful, filling the live interview with gaps and silences. Sometimes their definitions became puzzling, especially when prompted to give categorical definitions. Though initially it seemed like there was a difficulty on the side of the interviewees to account for their own practice, I have come to realize that the doubtfulness and gaps were actually functioning as symptoms. The slits in the narrations of the dancers came to account for the particular way in which the encounter between two histories has taken place: a concert dance history that circulates more or less globally and a local dance history. On the one hand, we have that this relationship is clearly asymmetric in terms of visibility, and on the other, that the assimilation of local practices to those Western canons seems to conceal different memory paths around their dance practices as well as other ways of talking about them.