"Dereskina. Feeling Under the Skin" - Six Illuminated Videos

The video essay presents a collaboration between a Senegalese dancer and a Swiss dance anthropologist, highlighting the potential of research-creation as ethnographic encounter. The dance production investigated the intimacy generated by movements, the appropriation of traditional gestures and the postcolonial exhibition of dancing bodies beyond blackness/whiteness. It also revealed questions of racial discrimination, pinpointing colonial residues still shaping North-South relationships. The work advocates for choreographic processes as a collaborative ethnography avoiding epistemic violence inherent within ethnographic encounters: in a dance studio, bodies meet on a more egalitarian way, allowing sensitive and political questions to emerge. The traditional hierarchy between researchers and informants is redefined, and fieldworks interlocutors become co-researchers (Lassiter 2005; Leavy 2009). This ethical approach allowed us to raise knowledge about artistic creation - the genesis of an artwork and the birth of movements -, questioning the value for knowledge (anthropological and artistic) when choreographic production meets ethnography.