Gabriela Ariana Aldana is a Chilean-born performance artist, choreographer, dancer, sound artist and poet.
Her artistic work, spanning over 28 years, explores the connection among everything in nature, in the inner nature of the body, in the cellular knowledge, in the embodied awareness about lifecycles, which often stand in opposition to the contemporary society’s structures.
In Gabriela’s work, dance is the core foundation from where also her work with sound, voice and writing emerge. Ecosomatic movement practice, based on human embryology, biology and environment’s connections, is part of her daily training in nature.
Through her art, she creates experiential spaces that emphasize ecology, participation, presence, a strong sense of nature, belonging and connection. Gabriela’s artistic perspective is also shaped by her life experiences: growing up and coming of age in Chile under dictatorship, migration, motherhood, and her work as a teacher and community facilitator.
My artistic practice is born from the body through Ecosomatic movement-voice practice and the connection with nature, where I do my daily practice. This practice, that I started developing since 1996, is an inner-body experience, with a scientific base in embryology and biology. It offers a wide range of sensations, that become blend with memories, with current daily life experiences and even with what’s occurring globally. Is a way of looking at the outside from the eyes of own nature in a relating motion. My practice is, most of all, a dance practice, where the movements can extend into voice, into words, into texts, into melodies. The practice opens a symbolic, dreamlike space, where everything that comes is allowed without the immediate analysis of the frontal lobe of the brain, that locks and interpret information too fast, losing the essence of it. I practice to stay in the experience of the sensations as long as I can and let the analytical reflections come later. That is how experiential knowledge can be lift up. It needs time, it happens in the opposite rhythm in which contemporary society lives in.
Experiential knowledge is timeless and is written in the cells of all beings. Is through this state of surrender and allowing, that I find myself reflecting deeply and questioning the structures of our society, the politics, the conflicts of humanity and, at the same time, bringing up the imaginary of the sensitive feeling body, its struggles, emotions, the sensual in them, to reclaim and express what has being and it’s being silenced. Sometimes sharp, sometimes tender, rather simple, I hold even the believe, that, my performances, movements, gestures, texts and melodies, could resonate deeply in others, so that we can hear each others untamed nature. That nature that, in spite of the structures of now days society, arises though art and reconnection not only with oneself, but mainly and most importantly, among each others as a collective.
Gabriela Ariana Aldana
Contact: gabrielaarianaart@gmail.com
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