Wake-Work: Embodying Ancestral Memory and Reparative Healing in Interdisciplinary Performance

As we draw from traditions such as Kumina, Vodou, and Palo Monte, alongside contemporary performance practices, this workshop invites participants into a choreographic dialogue with the past. Through movement, we trace the ancestral imprints that reside within us, the Orishas and spirits of the departed, awakening the gestures of survival, mourning, and renewal that have been carried across waters, passed through generations, encoded in muscle and marrow.

The ocean is our witness, our portal, our guide. Its tides mirror the undulating rhythms of loss and regeneration, its depths cradle the stories of those who came before us. In the wake of history, we dance—not merely as an act of remembrance but as an act of repair. This is wake-work, a labor of love and reckoning, a choreography of resistance and restoration.

By engaging the body as an archive, we move beyond intellectual inquiry into visceral knowing. This workshop is not simply about performance; it is about presence. It is about listening to what the body carries, what the ancestors whisper, what the waters remember. Through guided movement, improvisation, and ritual practice, we will create a shared space of witnessing, where grief transforms into praise, where mourning becomes a site of power, where the past speaks—and we answer with our bodies.

Here, in the wake, we dance.

This workshop is part of our 2025 workshop series titled “There is Nothing to Fix. You Just Have to Let it Rock" which centers embodied solidarity and is curated by artist Raoni Muzho Saleh. Raoni chose a quote by artist and writer, Martin Prechtel as the title of the series to signal what is at its core; “feeling your emotions by being rocked by them instead of dispossessing yourself from your human experience by way of fixing your emotional turmoil”. The main theme of the series is the transformative power of rage and grief. Not only as emotions and responses to the world that we feel individually, but as necessary for our ability to create collective, liberatory change. Follow the links below to find out more about the workshops in this series.

Connecting to our Rage as The Eternal Fire Within: Stewarding our Responses and Responsibility to the World by Raoni Muzho Saleh

Connecting to the Grief under the Rage by Raoni Muzho Saleh

The Mourning Choir by A.E.Z. Pinay

Fabulating Spells by Anllel Maria

Hibernating Lava: Unfolding Otherwise by Laima Jaunzema

Public conversation: The Transformative Power of Collective Grief with Dr. Yanique Hume, Raoni Muzho Saleh, Laima Jaunzema, Anllel Maria and A.E.Z. Pinay 

This program was inspired by the conversations we had with our collaborators in 2024 - Rethinking Wellness and Communal Embodied Practices specifically– in which we looked at ways to decenter thinking and working with the body from the notion of individualistic self-actualization. Instead we put the focus on imagining communal embodied practices as a necessity for our individual and collective awareness of the political and social climate around us, making it possible to build community and affect change collectively. This year we build on these moments of collective reimagining with the interactive workshop program “There is Nothing to Fix. You Just Have to Let it Rock." It is one of the community collaboration projects we do at Research Center for Material Culture that are an evolving practice of creating space for the creative agency for members of historically marginalized communities in the museum.