Approach
What if body wasn't a single entity, but a community of different members, each with their own history, stories, and ways of relating to each other?
Our multi-storied bodies is an approach to enquiry and co-research that has emerged from multiple intersecting practices. It’s a way of working that is grounded in social justice, narrative, decolonial, and feminist worldviews. It wants to challenge the old hierarchies that rank our bodies and how this creates internal hierarchies between members of body community influencing how value and power is distributed.
When you ask body a question, who are you talking to? Who holds the power to answer, and whose voice(s) gets left out of the conversation?
This practice is cross-cultural and cross-linguistic, moving past the idea that a single, uniform language or culture runs through body community and neighbouring bodies. It dismantles the idea of one all-knowing "Narrator." Instead, it encourages our many selves to offer imperfect translations of experience, which can then be shared, circulated, and connected with others.
“Tongue sits back and firm against upper mouth... Throat wails ‘parched’ but lips silence and return this wail to throat to swallow down... Below sternum everyone has been reduced to rations, each left with very little air to go about their daily tasks." (excerpt from my practice journal)
This approach came from noticing that a big part of practice is returning and reviewing questions on account of the effects people share with us. Part of that return and review for me was constantly asking feminist and decolonial bodies for their perspective to guide my unlearning and creative imagining. Feminism(s) catches our attention and reminds us to slow down, circle back, and stay with the unfolding experience instead of rushing for a conclusion. Decolonialism invites us to pay attention to the architecture of story as much as the details of the story itself.
This approach asks us to stay alert to how failure and modern power systems try to trap us, discouraging us from taking risks or stepping out of bounds.
At the centre, this practice is dedicated to attending to the split between earth, body, and mind that oppressive systems use to break our relationships and silence our knowledge. Actively welcoming experience without hierarchies and refusing to chase after some ideal form of community or normal way of being.
Our multi-storied bodies
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Our multi-storied bodies *
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maiskind, founded on the streets of Cologne in 2020 by iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo, is a transdisciplinary community. We understand choreography as a social practice: a way of organizing proximity, difference, and attention between bodies. In this collaboration we investigate how collective movement in public space can become an act of care, resistance, and queer world-making.
Rather than asking when dance begins, we focus on how participation is structured. Who is invited to move? Who hesitates? Who remains unseen? Public space is never neutral — it carries histories of exclusion and control. Through choreographic scores and guided rituals, we intervene in these structures and test how shared movement can generate alternative forms of belonging.
Our collaborative artistic research explores collective choreography as multi-storytelling — a system in which gestures, pauses, and encounters circulate narratives that are not spoken yet deeply felt. We are interested in how choreography can function as a relational architecture: supporting difference without dissolving it, holding multiplicity without forcing unity. Together, we translate narrative therapy perspectives into choreographic systems of collective care.
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From this body of work emerged a curated writing series where we dive into the experiential practice of writing with our multi-storied bodies and neighbouring bodies.
Positioning play and process at the centre we seek to suspend orientating towards outcome and turn towards collective moment-by-moment research creation.
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