Dani D’Emilia

https://danidemilia.com

Transfeminist artist and educator working internationally across performance art, devised theatre, visual arts and radical pedagogy projects. Co-founder of the immersive theatre company Living Structures (UK) and the artistic space Roundabout.lx (Lisbon, PT). Core member of the transnational performance collective La Pocha Nostra(MX/US) between 2011-2016 and Proyecto Inmiscuir (ES/MX) between 2015-17.

With the support of a research fellowship from Musagetes Foundation (CA) I am currently engaged in research around possibilities for radical pedagogies and decolonial education through artistic and critical practices as part of Gorca Earthcare program (Slovenia), Free Home University (Italy), Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures(University of British Columbia, Canada) and other research-in-practice contexts, including sessions of ongoing embodied investigations I facilitate in Lisbon, where I am currently based.

My work explores the co-production of critical knowledge and political imagination through languages that go beyond rational and discursive realms. Making use of the potential of performance/art as an ’embodied mode of encounter’ I combine performance-pedagogy (performance practice as a pedagogical process of unlearning), radical tenderness (a mode of political-poetic resistance), transfeminist (intersectional and trans inclusive feminism) and decolonial (interrogating colonial legacies on our bodies and subjectivities) approaches. I use these tools to explore ways in which we can create and nurture political-affective communities and alliances that take into account – yet attempt not to reproduce – different forms of violence inherent in our construction as political subjects. Working from the body I explore our ability to perceive others through multiple senses and modes of knowing, inhabiting the contradictions, incoherences and vulnerabilities that arise in the process of daring to blur borders between notions such as identity and otherness, individuality and collectivity, tension and trust. (More info on the workshops I facilitate are available in the Performance Pedagogy section of this website)

The specific themes, methodologies and aesthetics of the work I make largely depend on the contexts/collaborators I am in dialogue with in each project. My personal imagery often utilizes some form of conceptual and/or physical distortion of the human body as a metaphor of the social body and its normative constrictions.

My artistic training includes and MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies by the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona (2016);  MA from the Independent Studies Program directed by Paul B. Preciado in PEI/MACBA – Museo de Arte Contemporanea de, Barcelona, ES (in which I also participated as part of the pedagogical team, facilitating performance workshops throughout 2014-15); BA in Devised Theatre and Visual Arts Practices from Dartington College of Arts (Devon, UK, 2007); Diploma in Mime & Physical Theatre from the Desmond Jones School (London, UK); and training with several practitioners with whom throughout the years I have studied Devised Theatre, Performance and Visual Art methodologies along with physical practices such as Suzuki, Yoga, Butoh, Contemporary Dance/Authentic Movement, Acrobatics and Physical & Anthropological Theatre Training, etc.

I have taught and presented work in various institutional and autonomous spaces in the following countries: Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Curaçao, Italy, Portugal, England, Scotland, Greece, Austria, Poland, Spain, Slovenia, Croatia, Germany, France, United States and Canada.