REPAIRING THE SEVERANCE

This issue opens with a conversation worth passing along. On That Decolonial Center, Camille Sapara Barton argues that rest is neither a luxury nor a personal failing to correct. It is a sacred practice that capitalism has systematically dismantled and replaced with an insistence on continuous output: the body managed as a machine, conditioned to skip the pause.

I. LISTENING

The Body Is Not a Machine

"Latest stage capitalism wants us to operate like machines as much as possible. Just part of that severing. Like 'oh no, we're not divine beings that are part of the Earth, we're machines who just have to run on productivity.' To me, that's embodied colonization."

— Camille Sapara Barton

Camille describes this condition as a severing: a detachment from internal sensation, from the land, from our ancestral cosmology, and from the basic capacity to stop. Repair cannot happen through a five-minute breathing exercise tucked into a packed calendar. It requires an accumulative, steady practice that operates well outside productivity metrics.

There is also a genealogy worth highlighting. Camille traces the lineages of somatic practices past modern Western branding back to older ancestral traditions. These include Eastern energy work like Tai Chi, Qigong, and Yoga; Indigenous African practices involving trance and ritual dance, as well as relational modalities like family constellations adapted from Zulu traditions; and bodywork techniques like osteopathy and craniosacral therapy, which draw from Cherokee and Shawnee traditions in North America.

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE

II. READING

A Glimpse into China's Dance works

Interestingly, three pieces in July and August came from China. Each offers its own entry point into posture, lineage, and physical memory.

• Harper Wang's Mo: Wang’s dance film operates in abstraction rather than narrative. The review traces how screen framing, shadow, and movement hold memory and isolation without resolving either into a linear story.
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The Weight of Emptiness: A Review of Harper WANG’s Mo

Tianyi Li reviews Harper Wang’s Mo, a dance film where emptiness becomes an active force, and the camera, shadow, and frame choreograph alongside the solitary performer.

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• She-Ritual (Ling Huang): Huang’s work draws directly on feminine ritual and embodied memory. Lineage here is not an abstract concept, it lives in hips, hands, and breath: something the body carries rather than merely represents.
  ➔ READ THE REVIEW

She Ritual : The Female Body as Archive, Offering, and Choreographic Site

Ling Huang’s solo turns fan, rice, and red thread into physical restriction the body has to work against. Rainy J. reviews the performance.

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• Chinese Dance and the Politics of Posture: Kari Fu’s essay approaches posture in Chinese dance as a historical record. From the tilt of a head to the alignment of the spine, Fu traces how social pressure and institutional discipline are written into physical form.
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What Chinese Dance Reveals About the Politics of Posture

From courtly sleeves to military uniforms, the body remembers what texts forget. An essay by Kari Fu.

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III. WATCHING

On Our Radar

• TUNE BACK (time): Premiering this September in Leipzig and Dresden. Read our preview piece ahead of the performance dates.
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TUNE BACK (time)

This fall in Leipzig and Dresden, Germany, six performers move through loops, glitches, and half remembered images, tracing the body’s back as the site where memory lives.

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• Brisbane Festival 2026: This preview tracks how the festival program engages First Nations performance and questions of land relation.
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What Remains: A Thematic Journey Through Brisbane Festival

What do we take from this life, this land, this community, and what do we leave behind? Leila Lois talks to Ebony Bott and the artists shaping her first Brisbane Festival programme (4–26 September, 2026) to find out.

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• The Devil's Fiddle: A UK production built around folklore, live music, and oral tradition. The review addresses how the piece stages myth without reducing it to simple spectacle.
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The Devil’s Fiddle, Danced

Steven McRae and Vasko Vassilev on obsession, collaboration, and making Paganini “look cool” at the Linbury

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"Embodied decolonization seeks to repair this severing and reconnect, not just with feeling and sensing and the wisdom of our bodies, but also reconnecting to the lands that we find ourselves on, our own ancestral lineages and beyond."

— Camille Sapara Barton

Rest well, and until next time.