Muriel Romero and Pablo Palacio

Oecumene is a performance of dance and technology that reflects on the place of the individual in the world beyond the limits of geographic and cultural origin. The name “Oecumene” is a term that comes from the Alexandrian ideal of the Cosmopolis: a world wholly inhabited, with the common ownership of a civilized humanity by free people. This creation is developed for a dancer within immersive, three-dimensional sound design, in which the dancer enters and interacts with a sound landscape composed of thousands of sounds from multiple places on the planet. The development of the expressive qualities of the dance, in relation to this tapestry of sounds, which is in constant transformation, functions like an organism that reflects the transcultural syncretism of the world in which we live. The piece also uses interactive technology that allows the dancer to interact in real time with these sounds (voices of various languages and auditory textures of all kinds), relating herself intimately with a reflection of sound from the multidimensional world around us. In a world where nationalism and identity politics are growing, Oecumene proposes a global vision of the richness and complexity of the world through its own experimentation of a sensory relationship throughout the body. By thinking of the world with our bodies in motion, dance and sound are conceived as organic structures that follow analogous growth processes.