Embodied explorations: Investigating the essence of a Malagasy funeral ritual

Drawing on a situated diasporic autoethnographic methodology, this research project investigates the underlying relational principles that constitute the essence of a Malagasy funeral ritual. Through embodied artistic practice, the project explores how these principles generate emerging ways of doing, thinking, and relating within contemporary dance. Engaging with the adaptive logic and transformative potential embedded in the ritual's underlying epistemology, the research asks how dance and choreographic practices can generate speculative cultural practices responsive to social and historical change. Situated within contemporary dance, the project explores the ritual's capacity to imagine alternative futures and aesthetics. Methodologically, the research adopts an autoethnographic and practice-based approach, combining embodied fieldwork with studio- and site-based explorations. Rather than representing the ritual, these artistic processes activate relational principles embedded in Malagasy ancestor practices to generate choreographic situations where situated forms of knowledge enter into dialogue, fostering social cohesion and collective imagination. The research contributes to broader discussions on choreography, cultural practices, contemporary dance, and artistic research.

How can a dance practice function as an embodied methodology for engaging with a Malagasy funeral ritual? How can choreography engage with the ritual’s continuity and transformation across social and historical change, and whether a common essence emerges across ritual and choreographic practice? What forms of knowledge and understanding emerge at the intersection of Malagasy ancestral epistemologies, diasporic experience, and choreographic practice, and how might such emergent knowledge be sustained and cared for? How might choreography create conditions for performance practices that sustain the relevance and transformation of cultural practices within contemporary socio-cultural contexts?

At this early stage of the research (30%), the first phase was dedicated to fieldwork in Madagascar, engaging with a Malagasy funeral ritual and its epistemologies through situated exchange and embodied presence. In parallel, the research was informed by an autoethnographic attention to a situated diasporic position in the North, integrating lived experience, artistic encounters, and theoretical readings. Together, these perspectives establish a methodology that operates through a continuous negotiation between geographies, contexts, and ways of knowing. Building on this foundation, the research developed a series of choreographic experiments through an autoethnographic and practice-based approach. Rather than translating fieldwork into performance, these explorations reshape embodied experiences, affective traces, and situated understandings through choreographic practice, allowing knowledge to emerge through doing rather than representation. The project contributes to contemporary dance and artistic research by investigating choreography as a mode of inquiry into ritual and epistemology. At this stage, it opens pathways for understanding choreography as a space where ancestral practices are re-situated and activated as embodied forms of knowledge and inquiry.

SoaZara Arts & Partage

2025-2029

https://www.gwenrakotovaocompany.org