Now Here/Nowhere is a residency that has been facilitated by Isabelle Kirouac & Trinidad Martinez, in collaboration with 25 local dancers and participants at El Quirofano, Murcia (Spain), in january 2013.

Through this collaborative research and creation process, we are interested in deepening questions of identity and migration. As travelling artists, working abroad and often not belonging to one single community, our sense of home is often uprooted. “Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time (…) the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.” Since 6 years, I have not had a house to live in. I am part of this new generation of those who created their identities by improvising a shelter made of habits (repetitions, opinions, gestures), memories and relationships. Humans are highly adaptable. Each time we inhabit a space, we tend to adjust to it, it becomes how we live our life; it becomes part of who we are.

Inspired by this process of transformation, we are interested in creating a dance performance using the techniques of dance improvisation and Contact improvisation, witch are both ways to adapt to the constant changes, guided by our awareness of the present moment. By coming together, with our different languages, our different cultures, our different geographies and landscapes, and by learning how to speak with our different bodies, how to move while listening one another, we will reinforce our common ground, create a new sense of home and open a doorway between where we were and where we are going. Each time we will find boundaries; the boundaries of our flesh, the boundaries of our politics, the boundaries of our land, of what we think is ‘us’ and what we think isn’t, what is “ours” and what is not “ours”, we will ask questions, reconsidered, reevaluated. The dance of improvisation is a dance where those boundaries are continually changed, redefined in every moment. How fluid is our perception, our own idea of who we are, what we are? It is not about grabbing a hold of something and hold it tight to make sure it last forever, but about showing up differently, freeing ourselves more, playing more and understanding more by deeply listening to each others in this present moment that we all share.

Now Here / Nowhere is about reimagining a time and space to meet; mapping the geography of now, an infrastructure of feelings, of connections and disconnections. It is an experiment to create new spaces, new ways of being.