femBlack Collective, mayfield brooks, Djibril Saal: Have You Heard? - Emerging Change as Community Clarion

Parvathi Ramanathan / March 2025.

The bouquet of performances and workshops that were part of the month-long Emerging Change TanzFestival inspired as varied responses in Parvathi Ramanathan as the events itself. In this commissioned text, she shares her impressions in fragmented texts, some of which take the form of letters, reports, and reflections, including contributions from participating eye-witnesses. Here within the folds of a spielzeit newspaper format she writes about the following events.
Performances and sharings:
‘Whale Fall: abyss’ by Mayfield brooks.
‘Djaam leeli’ by Djibril Saal.
‘another space / memory’ by femBlack Collective.
Workshops:
‘Decomposing (decolonizing) Somatics: decentering the human’ with mayfield brooks.
‘Post-Failure Potentials’ with Makisig Akin & Anya Cloud/The Love Makers Company.
‘The Rest Bath’ with Isabelle Dikumbi.

The curated programme of performances and workshops at the Emerging Change festival offered an opportunity to trade tools for resilience and reclamation. These tools – such as sharing, generosity, community care, laughter, vulnerability, rest – appeared as themes within the performances as well in the attitude of the festival space itself.

brooks conjures up the imagination to view oneself as a large body sheathed in thick blubber. Here, instead of holding the blubber body dear to us, we become available and let the little sea creatures take what they need. At the end workshop, as I moved across the room with other soluble whale siblings, I welcomed the fluidity that it brought in my body. Not firmly grounded like the earth or a tree, I was in resonance with other diffracting creatures, decomposing to form again.

At first appearing to be coping frenzies, they in fact suggest a laughter of resilience – laughter in the face of, laughter inspite of, laughter together.

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