This performance/video talk reflects on how intergenerational care and ancestral relationships can serve as disruptive, decolonising tools in performance-making practice. An excerpt from Fabiola’s performance We’re Here Because They Were demonstrates how research questions are embodied and brought into dialogue between performers and audiences.
We ask: how has colonialism disrupted the care passed down by our elders? What embodied forms of resilience have survived? How can ritual restore our sense of collective care in societies that racialise and dehumanise us?
Centring lived experiences of women from the Global Ethnic Majority — whose bodies carry the legacy of colonial rupture, care and resilience — the work explores how domestic gestures (hair braiding, feeding, resting) become portals of decolonial practice. Dramaturgy incorporates performance scores that explore outsider-within perspectives; the body as a colonised site, resisting; and future-building through rest.
Weaving personal narratives with somatic and psychophysical practices — including Cranio-sacral therapy as a medium to reconnect with ancestors and generate decolonial movement— the work challenges epistemic injustices embedded in Euro-American performance training and academia.
Rooted in decolonial diasporic frameworks, the presentation engages Black Feminist Thought; Arabella Stanger’s critique of colonial embodiment (2021); Roderick Ferguson’s notion of the university as a site of ancestral disruption (2021); Walter Mignolo’s work on decoloniality (2018); and Tricia Hersey’s Rest as Resistance (2022).
Part of Fabiola’s PhD research as a VC Scholar in Performance and Decolonial Studies at Liverpool Hope University, this work contributes to a global decolonial praxis of healing, multiplicity, and collective liberation.