I have recently begun a creative process centred on the notion of time and parar, expanding on my recently completed PhD research, which focused on the same themes. Through choreographic practice, this process explores time and parar—a Spanish term that, in Chile, my home country, means both ‘to stop’ and ‘to stand up’/’buil up’. The work seeks to investigate how this action of parar might foster alternative experiences of time through dance.

Specifically, it examines parar in relation to dominant discourses and critical issues surrounding the concept of time in Chile’s colonial–neoliberal society—such as time poverty, linear temporality, acceleration, and rupture with the past—while situating its scope of action within the migrant dance scene beyond Chilean territory. 

It also considers the contradictions and frictions involved in attempting to explore embodied foreign de(s)colonial thinking while situated in the Global North and former colonial centre.

The dance process seeks to deepen the potential of a gesture and a sound, inviting an appreciation of subtleties, nuances, slowness, waiting, and silences.

It presents taking time to move as an embodied political act — tender yet deliberately disruptive; simple, yet profoundly transformative.

The first stage of this process unfolded through a residency generously awarded by The Work Room.

Parar in The Work Room

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