A collaboration between Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt and choreographer Ola Stinnerbom

Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt and Ola Stinnerbom have been colleagues for many years in Gothenburg.
In April, 2022, they were invited by Stockholm University of the Arts to do a keynote presentation at the digital conference Decolonizing Tertiery Dance Education in Action – Time to Act, arranged by Stockholm University of the Arts and Makerere University, Uganda.

When we met to discuss and rehearse our presentation, Ami pre-recorded and edited together the collaboration to make the presentation accessible also for people outside the university.

This is how we presented our keynote:
We have collaborated on an embodied keynote about how we can offer different stories about Sweden and Sápmi where we live. We therefore present a collection of movements to support these narratives. We think of un-conferencing as a way to embed non-word discussions through movement – as a way of communication. Thus, we create time and space for movements as part of our keynote, where we also use video and sound. One of the lights used for walking and dancing through our keynote is the chapter Decolonized-Research-storying: Bringing Indigenous Ontologies and Care into the Practices of Research writing. The authors of the chapter invited Eatname, the earth itself, to become the narrator. We invite specific spaces in Sápmi, Sweden and elsewheres to join our research-storying. We focus on movement and the healing and caring of ancestors in certain spaces. We do this as groundwork in search of unstrategies for decolonizing dance practices. We thus invite non-humans to be dancers, thinkers and activists in our presentation. Our own ancestors are given space to move with us and through us.presentation hette Dancing with our Ancestors.

You can watch the full presentation here:

Ola and Ami have continued to collaborate. They are now working on a text together for the journal Dance Articulated, edited by Professor Tone Pernille Østern.