Artistic Residency SER

Video composition of choreographic research, during my artistic residency in SER (School of Empathetic Research @empatheticresearch), July 2021.

Videos by Rai Jacobo Velasco
Music: Gimme Some por Weval
Video editing by me

I spent the month of July 2021 in Zoncuantla, near Xalapa, Veracruz, in an artistic residency at SER. I really enjoyed dancing in the river, in the garden and in the forest. I did some choreographic research on thoracic and abdominal movements, isolated movements of the shoulder blades, very slow movements, and playing between vertical and horizontal surfaces. I also read a lot about the breath, its anatomy, its unknown and spiritual functions. In the same period, an alternative mental health resource organization from Montreal (where I grew up) contacted me to share my story with withdrawing of psychiatric medications in a documentary (I wrote and self-published a zine on the subject in 2016, after being medicated for 4 and a half years). My month of solitude in the forest allowed me to continue my process with the deep traumas that psychiatry left me. My choreographic research has to do with that; a kind of exorcism of psychiatry from my body by movement. I am starting a creation process that will be long.