MITOTE

Applying an Indigenous perspective to conventional ‘western’ scholarship, this paper proposes a dance praxis entitled Mitote, which seeks to produce an Indigenous dance process of decolonization for Indigenous liberation and empowerment. This document serves as a starting point for the evolution of contemporary Indigenous dance work that respects Indigenous land and protocols of cultural production, yet is innovative, avant-garde, and modern. Under the premise that modern dance is intimately related to traditional Indigenous dance, this project proposes a process for the decolonization of contemporary modern dance. Ultimately, it provides a means to lift the ideology of “the Natives as the static past” and place them into the present and innovative future. Held as a living, growing, and developing research document cataloguing this author’s own artistic process, this paper is only a short beginning of a life’s work, practice, research, and creation.

MITOTE: A Manifesto for Avant-Garde Dance Written In Indigenous Knowledge