Lazaro Benitez
Occupation 2

What gestures emerge in a context of occupation? How can dance bear witness to a social reality, to a way to be in the world? After the devastation, what movements persist?

Occupation 2 is a choreographic investigation into the consequences of a form of modern colonialism: the occupation by multinationals of territories inhabited by disadvantaged peoples.
In August 2001, the Anglo-Swiss mining company Glencore forcibly evicted the inhabitants of the village of Tabaco, a territory inhabited by an Afro-descendant and Wayuu community (Colombia’s main indigenous community). 23 years on, and the 1,200 families evicted have still not been rehoused. Lazaro Benitez has invited five Colombian dancers to explore together how dance can bear witness to and accompany the struggles that arise in spaces of invisibility, violence and silence. Drawing on various archive materials and the metrical rhythm of Vallenato, the popular music of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, Occupation 2 creates a space of memory between fiction and documentary, through which the dancers reconstruct and heal their relationship with their territory. A poetic reparation through dance that questions the role of art in the post-colonial dynamics that persist today.

Occupation 2 follows on from a first choreographic piece presented in 2023 at the Festival d’Avignon as part of ‘Vive le sujet! Tentatives’, at the invitation of the Festival d’Avignon and the SACD.