#decolonialpractice

YOGGATON is a movement practice I’m currently developing. It is oriented towards physical training and spiritual development through movement and a series of guided imagination exercises. 

It is divided in two parts. The first part is the warming up in which,  through a series of exercises that gathers Hatha Yoga asanas, perreo (twerk), and some pole dance warming up exercises,  the possibility of an intense aerobic workout is offered. The second part, aims, through guidance, to a deeper recognition of self-empowerment through the practice of certain movements related to sensual/sexual connotation and its direct relationship to the need for accepting and embracing one’s own body with everything it brings within, in order to develop a healthy image of the self.

The practice is accompanied by reggaeton music, most of the times includes sexual content in its lyrics and since it is performed mostly by men, the conflict is the position of the sexual object it gives to women. For me it is important to appropriate and subvert everything that has a diminishing content because then it is not damaging anymore. In this way, YOGGATON aims to put ourselves, women, in the position of the desiring person, the one that is not afraid of showing, proposing, asking and experimenting with her own body, her sensuality/sexuality and the pleasure that exploring with it brings.

After the sessions, the philosophical and spiritual notions are shared in order to relate them with the body practice, as well as the impressions and thoughts of the participants.

So far, YOGGATON is the most clear Ch’ixi practice I have because it has different layers of complexity:

1.  The consideration and embodiment of contradictions are a huge part of my work. Witch-bitch, good-bad, enlightened-mundane, reason-intuition, etc, are still consider to be far apart one from the other, at least from the context I come from, but acknowledging the connection of those opposites and being able to stretch their meanings, realms of understanding, and broadening the possibilities for identification/disidentification.

2. Hacking the original understandings, forms or ways of using Yoga and Reggaeton is already questioning and disintegrating it’s fixed frames.

3. In this practice the realms of the mundane, divine, sensual, sexual and physical workout are coexisting in sort of a non-hierarchical juxtaposition.

I’m really trying to create many different ways of accessing this practice so that the participants can find their own way to be engaged. 

¿Where will the practice of YOGGATON lead this research to? 

¿Is it necessary to shape this practice to be shown on stage?

¿How can the audience become engaged with something that from the outside looks just as any work out

¿Do I need to think on ways to represent YOGGATON? ¿Wouldn’t that be an epistemological contradiction already?

I have lots of questions that I’m looking forward to find the answers for during this week. But even when not fully finding them I feel that remaining honest to the research is the most important of all.

Last but not least, for the sake of finding a point of reference for YOGGATON as a hybrid practice, I attach the link of description of the Techno somatic practice developed by Fréd Gies: