Our dance: the laborious exercise of naming (us), imagining (us), dancing (us)

Abstract

This article questions the ways in which Ecuadorian dance, or our dance, is generally understood. It tackles the question avoiding the notion of a natio- nal identity. Thus, it builds upon alternative understandings of territory, cultural formations and filiations and it draws a moving landscape that refuses to be contained within pre-established borders. The aim is to apprehend the dances made in Ecuador as the product of the crossing of different historicities and bodies that, in their complex relationality, cannot be understood as either endemic or foreign. The particularity and the value of the dances produced in this part of the world can be found therefore on the specificity of these crossings. This articles seeks to understand dance creations through a study of their historical particularities, which sets them in relation to other dances, rather than trying to relate them to a (national) identity that would set them apart from that which is considered different.