Amanda Piña / Juan José Katira Ramirez - Dance like a Wixarika

A three-day workshop involving Wixarika dance forms, shamanic thought, philosophy and somatic practices. Central aspect is the generation of energy through circular concepts of dance and the exploration of changes in perception derived from the choreography. In Wixarika dances, the body is not abstracted or dissected by anatomy but is understood as total experience, as earth, in terms of ancestral relation to the sacred animals and plants that populate the world and Wixarika art. The workshop is an invitation to share a different concept of dance with a different function, duration and use of body than the dances for the stage we know in the West, exploring dance in relation to agricultural practices of subsistence, to earth and to the notion of sacred territory.

* Wixarika, as being from the Huichol or Wixáritari people, which are an indigenous people of Mexico living in the Sierra Madre Occidental range in the states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Durango. They are best known to the larger world as the Huichol, however, they refer to themselves as Wixáritari (“the people”) in their native Huichol language. The adjectival form of Wixáritari and name for their own language is Wixárika.