We asked what activism might mean – and enact – today particularly (though not exclusively) in the Global South, which is still struggling with colonial legacies and the ongoing struggles to engage what decoloniality might look like in our everyday lived experiences and practices. This is set against an ongoing global geopolitics where transnational corporations and economic policies often impact more than political policies do. And all this backgrounded against political destructions as played out in places like Palestine, Sudan, Syria and DRC

We asked: what might we mean by moving bodies as disruptive presencing? What do we need to signal presence or absence? What roles do intention and bodily energy play in these processes? How might choreographic acts interrupt, or not interrupt, regimes of control, surveillance, extraction, and bodily regulation, while negotiating risk, precarity, care, and collective survival?

Further, we provoked brown’s (2019) ideas of ‘pleasure activism’. brown elaborates on how pleasure and the allowance to feel and explore pleasure, is an act of activism that she argues is directly linked to freedom. How do the somatic practices of dance allow for this ‘pleasure activism’?

This 6th JMD foregrounded dance as a primary site of both personal and political knowledge production. Drawing on decolonial, feminist, queer, indigenous, and Critical Black studies frameworks, we ask how movement can generate ways of knowing that exceed textual, juridical, or institutional forms of politics (Mbembe, 2001; Moten, 2017; Taylor, 2003).

We were particularly interested in how Global South dance practices theorise politics from the body through sensation, repetition, duration, exhaustion, joy, and communal presence.

Bringing together scholars, artists, choreographers, and activists, JMD26 sought to collectively articulate how moving bodies can make claims, sustain or reframe struggles, and generate forms of knowledge that are sensorial, relational, and urgently situated in the Global South.