2026: Ancestral Futurities: Encounters with Heritage in Contemporary Dance and Choreographic Practices.
A symposium co-funded by the Gender|Queer|Diversity call and Tanzquartier Wien. 

Project management from mdw: Beatriz Herrera Corado
Curation team: Ulduz Ahmadzadeh, Beatriz Herrera Corado, Christina Gillinger, Isabel Lewis

This encounter seeks to generate a transformative movement into a future that reframes, expands, and critically positions dance knowledge systems in the dominant frameworks of the European and North American dance canon. The questions that motivate the encounter are: How do artists engage with the cultural heritage, dance practices and rituals connected to ancestrality?  What strategies and methodologies are used by artists/ researchers in their practice?  How can knowledge systems, narratives, memories, and traditions be transmitted, and how do their meanings shift in contemporary art contexts?

Over the course of three days, artists, scholars, cultural practitioners, and other interested individuals will come together to exchange ideas, methods, and experiences around knowledge systems applied in contemporary dance practices. The program includes scholarly, and artistic engagements organized in panel discussions, lectures, and studio labs. It creates a space to acknowledge the diversity of bodily epistemologies, highlighting how social, political, spiritual, and ancestral movement practices inform, challenge, reshape, and expand contemporary dance and choreography. The aim is to collectively generate an ongoing questioning of what we label as traditional and contemporary and investigate ways of creating relationships among translocal experiences and their transmissions.

This project is centered on a decolonial critique of contemporary dance that aims for the recognition of dance heritage from the Global South as a relevant domain of artistic epistemology. As gender roles and identities are usually a topic of dispute within traditional practices, the presence of female artists and scholars is proposed to deliver a critical approach towards the challenges for gender representation and creative agency within contemporary dance, without losing the connection to traditional knowledge. The selection of the keynotes coming from an anthropological background is key for an in-depth discussion on gender and inequality. 

The symposium is connected to the artistic work by Ulduz Ahmadzadeh as a choreographer whose work has centered Southwest Asian dance traditions in the scene of contemporary dance. Since dance is forbidden in Iran as a public spectacle, her last three pieces Tarab (2022), Zaar (2023), and Vasht (2025) have premiered in Austria. Her goal is to expand on research methodologies that connect and allow the dissemination of knowledge from marginalized dance practices.   

Beatriz Herrera Corado
University Assistant - Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst, Wien
PhD Candidate - Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst, Graz
MA Choreomundus - International Master in Dance Knowledge Practice and Heritage
https://beaherreracorado.wixsite.com/beatriz

Liaison Officer for Guatemala,
International Council for Music and Dance Traditions
https://ictmd.org/world-network