The Garden of Falling Sands

(c) G2 Baraniak

Since the 1970s, a special form of Latin American cumbia music, "Cumbia Colombiana", has developed in the Mexican city of Monterrey, which borders the USA. The dances of this cumbia, which are characterised by slowed-down rhythmic shifts, are mainly practised by marginalised communities there and are constantly changing in line with styles, fashions and the urgency of social conditions. Here, living traditional dance functions as a ritual of identity and empowerment. In "The Garden of Falling Sands", Yolanda Morales and her team install a utopian, magical place on stage, a garden bathed in a yellow, warming light. A place that is fictitiously embedded in this other cultural space, in the barren, ecologically and politically crisis-ridden desert landscape of northern Mexico. She poses questions about the permeability of borders and affiliations in the face of the inhumane effects of a global economic system based solely on growth and profit interests. How do new rituals emerge that can create common ground in our increasingly divergent societies? In her latest work, Hamburg-based Mexican choreographer Yolanda Morales once again explores the roots of her origins and the echoes they create in her German homeland. A homeland that is characterised by a Eurocentric view, also of her dance art, in which she, as a choreographer, consistently adopts a de-colonising stance.